The Craig-Martin touch

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition has very little in common with the Venice Biennale. However they do share one characteristic. Each always contains so many diverse and potentially incompatible elements that orchestrating a smoothly blended result is dauntingly difficult. But, as with many almost impossible tasks, some manage it much better than others. Michael Craig-Martin, this year’s chief co-ordinator at the RA, has produced a distinctly better result than usual.

The Summer Exhibition always tends to look — as David Hockney once put it — like a jumble sale. But the 2015 edition is a jumble sale with pizzazz and a chromatic zing. The transformation begins before you even get into the exhibition. The grand staircase at Burlington House has been covered in the brilliantly coloured stripes of one of Jim Lambie’s ‘Zobop’ floors (in which strips of glossy tape follow the lines of the architecture). Perhaps the academicians ought to keep it.

When you walk into the octagonal entrance gallery, your first impression is that he’s transformed the place into one gigantic Craig-Martin. The walls of this room have been painted in one of his trademark colours, a vivid greenish-blue (every painter has a distinctive range of hues; Craig-Martin’s has the acid sharpness of cheap sweets). Against this background, one work — appropriately enough by the current president of the Academy, Christopher Le Brun — sings out.

Freely painted and abstract in yellow and orange, this is not like any work by him I have seen before; in this context it looks terrific. Abstraction, it turns out, is one of the outstanding categories of art this year. It dominates Gallery III next door, which Craig-Martin has decorated in a marvellous teenager’s-plastic-handbag pink. Hanging on this is a succession of large-scale works that are less crammed together than is customary at the Summer Exhibition.