Andy Parkinson reviews the exhibition William Scott at The Hepworth Wakefield, on view through September 29, 2013.

Parkinson writes: "Paintings like White, Sand and Ochre, and Still Life with Orange Note, as well as one of Scott’s latest paintings Orange Segments, remind me of the way that ‘pure’ colours refer to the outside world even in the names we give to them, and I experience a moment of confusion: 'is orange a colour or a fruit?' I wonder if the more abstract they become the more they invite multiple references, but increasingly ambiguous, subjective ones. Patrick Heron referred to Scott’s work as an 'intensely personal amalgam of the figurative and non-figurative' and Herbert Read said that in Scott’s more abstract work he found 'a sensuousness and a potency of evocation that I find completely seductive.' Isn’t this what happens with abstraction, and the modernist search for the universal? The more universal the image, the more particulars can be projected onto it."