Sean Scully, Kerlin Gallery

THIS is what in the trade is called a "really strong show", something which is very much rarer than the public may think. Scully, by this stage, is familiar to Dublin gallery-goers and, while he is not a repetitious painter, his style is outwardly simplified and instantly recognisable.

So there are, in short, few or no surprises; just direct, powerful, richly-crafted pictures which confront you like heavy-weight icons while generally concealing their own subtlety.

Outside the major retrospective in IMMA last year, this is the most consistent Scully exhibition I have seen in Ireland, level in quality from first to last - and that includes large oils, pastels, watercolours and etchings.

The dominant work is a massive painting entitled Helen, built in striated rectangles of greyish tones but with two "panels" inset (literally) in it. Small Yellow Union emphasises a chromatic twitch or tug-at-arms between the adjoining squares of colour, as though they were locked in a chess game. Yet it is the two pastels which I thought the most sensitive works on view, and also the most absorbing in terms of form and colour.

Scully's pastels, in fact, show his intimate side and they provide a contrast or counterpoint to the large paintings, which seem essentially public rather than private statements.

While the architecture of the big works is deliberate, methodical and sometimes rather four-square, the pastels and smaller works have a sense of creative freedom and even improvisation. Not to mention a perfect "touch" in what can be a treacherous medium.

Scully is not a notably inventive artist in the formal sense; he virtually restricts his vocabulary to combinations and contrasts of squares, rectangles, stripes etc, though he re-shuffles these like a pack of cards. Neither is he an obvious innovator, though his aesthetic personality is all of a piece and has a rocklike solidity.

To view his work again is to be reminded of what he has learned from his predecessors of the New York School from Rothko to Ad Reinhardt, or even from Albers and Mondrian.

Ultimately, what makes him so convincing is his sheer quality as a painter he is a man who makes "marks" and those marks have an innate life and energy which cannot be counterfeited.