Piers Veness reviews Peter Halley: Paintings from the 1980s at Modern Art, London, on view through March 18, 2017.

Veness writes that the paintings on view “[return] us to the familiar shapes, colours and textures of Peter Halley – the hard-lined geometry of Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit (1982), for example, with its characteristic Roll-a-Tex surface. The bigger pieces have been hung in the large gallery space behind where, in a superb voltage of colour and line, the colours are so bright that they bounce off the polished concrete floor of the gallery. The neo-geos of Three Sectors (1986) vibrate out into the space, and its crisp, hard edges look as though they were finished yesterday.”