Evans is a place on Earth: Tangled Up In Blue.

"Every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal. Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you, tangled up in blue" - Tangled up in Blue, Bob Dylan

"Good God, almighty. There's no denying life would be better if I never ever had to live with you, blue. It's a colour so cruel" - Blue, The Fine Young Cannibals.

Paula Rego - The Sky was Blue the Sea was Blue and the Boy was Blue (2017)

Blue's an important colour, isn't it? With red and yellow it's one of the big three primary colours but it's also the colour of both the sea and the sky. Or at least the colour we perceive the very best skies and seas to be. It can, as in the case of Bob Dylan and many before and after him, be used as shorthand for a low feeling, perhaps one of romantic loss or longing. But it can also, especially by my parents' generation, be a word that denotes a rude comedian.

Jim Davidson, Jethro, Roy 'Chubby' Brown - all of that shit. On the theme of Jim Davidson, it is, also, in Britain, the colour of the Conservative party and when The Fine Young Cannibals called blue a "colour so cruel" I think it's fair to say that weren't raging against the sea or the sky. Blue has a place at the top table in the art world too. It'd be hard for it not to.

The Victoria Miro online exhibition, The Sky was Blue the Seas was Blue and the Boy was Blue (named for a Paula Rego work of 2017), delves deeper into the history of blue in art. The introduction informs us how, from the days of ancient Egypt through to the Renaissance, blue was made from the intensely coloured precious stone lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. So venerated was its ultramarine hue that it was reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary and her heavenly robes.

In more modern times, Picasso has famously had a blue period and French performance artist Yves Klein so loved blue, or ultramarine, that he created his own International Klein Blue and exhibited works that consisted of nothing but entire canvasses full of that. The Sky was Blue etc;, however, doesn't include any Picassos or Kleins, much less Renaissance or ancient Egyptian works.

It is, more or less, a contemporary look at blue art. But it still contains some rather wonderful work. Rego's titular work is inspired by a 2005 story, Bastardia, by the Portuguese novelist Helia Correia about a boy who, perhaps on account of being blue, believes his father is the sea. The boy had never visited the ocean so he embarked on an epic journey there, only to die on arrival.

A sad story, for sure, but one that feels even sadder when you think of the three year old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who died on a beach in Turkey in September 2015 as, with his family, he sought refuge in Europe. The beauty of the blue in Rego's painting then becomes impossible to separate from the 'blue' of sadness.

The ocean, as it does in Celia Paul's Steve in his Rowing Boat, suddenly becomes vast, sublime, intangible, and, in ways, impenetrable. Chris Ofili's Crowning of a Satyr (Blue) tells a different story. One of human and water coming together. A human, here, in the form of a blue selkie (a seal that can shed its sealskin to reveal human form) seen crowning a satyr. Ofili's painted the selkie at the exact moment of transformation. When it is most at one with the water.

Chris Ofili - Crowning of a Satyr (Blue) (2021)

Idris Khan - So many all of nothing (2020)

It's calming in a way Rego's work could, and should, not be. Idris Khan's So many of all nothing, nods to Rothko notwithstanding, is also easy on the eyes. As with Rothko's work, you could lose yourself in the deep colour field of Khan's painting. A more critical take would suggest that Khan owes a little too much to Rothko.

Still, it's nice. Not too hectic. Which can't be said for all the abstract works that Victoria Miro have chosen for this show. Sarah Sze is inspired by the persistence of vision that remains in our perception and memory when we have stopped viewing something, Secundio Hernandez has tried to emphasise the duality of the colour blue (how it can represent beauty as easily as distress or violence), and Flora Yukhnovich has taken for her starting point Rococo artist Francois Boucher's 1740 The Triumph of Venus to create a work in which the sea, usually female when spoken about, is as much capricious and destructive as it is fluid and soft.

Sarah Sze - Afterimage, Screen with Blue Brush Stroke (Painting in its Archive) (2018)

Secundio Hernandez - Kind of Blue (2021)

Flora Yukhnovich - Cream always rises (2021)

All interesting ideas - though some work better than others. Sze's doesn't do much for me, Hernandez's work is on a par with, but no better than, many similar abstracted works I've seen in recent exhibitions, and though on initial viewing I didn't warm to Yukhnovich's Cream always rises, it was the one of these three that won me over in the end.

Then again I've always loved a wild sea and I'm not averse to capricious and destructive women either! Other more or less abstract works like John Korner's Shadows of the Moon (inspired, I read, by Marukami's 1Q84) and Ilse D'Hollander's dark nocturne that cites the influence of Klimt and Schiele please the eye but Yukhnovich's work stays with you longer.

Ilse D'Hollander - Untitled (1990-91)

Howardena Pindell - The Wave (2011)

Sadly, Howardena Pindell's The Wave was less impressive than some of the many works I've seen (and written about) of hers before. The Sky was Blue etc; was, for me, stronger when it mined the areas between figuration and abstraction than when it drilled down too heavily on either. Ali Banisadr, a new name on me, impressed me with this year's Lapis. To suggest Picasso's Guernica as an influence is probably to dangerously over-egg the pudding but it did remind me of the rather delightful Hynek Martinec works I saw in the Parafin gallery back in 2017.

Ali Banisadr - Lapis (2021)

Grayson Perry - Map of Nowhere (blue) (2008)

A feast for the eyes. As, of course - as ever, was Grayson Perry's Map of Nowhere. If you like Perry (and you really should) you'll like this. It's got a lot of his trademark stuff. Cats, maps, himself, Alan Measles (I think), and, as ever, that sense of curiosity and generosity that comes over both in his art and in the documentaries and television shows he makes.

There's much more space, more room to breathe, in Do Ho Suh's doorway and Tal R's faux-naive nautical whimsy and even in NS Harsha's oh so topical, still, surgical glove. These are paintings that use blue to render liminal or other transitory spaces and places with yet more depth. A sense of longing is imbued on to fairly prosaic, otherwise, illustrations that reflects, perhaps, the feelings we experience entering buildings, boats, and medical facilities.

Do Ho Suh - Main Entrance, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 (2016)

Tal R - eventually all museums will become ships (2018)

NS Harsha - May 2020 (2020)

We have, by now, moved away completely from the abstract and into the realms of the figurative and we remain there for the rest of the exhibition (at least in the order I've curated it - one of the advantages of these online experiences, a rare credit tick in the Covid ledger) even if Isaac Julien's After the Deluge and Jules de Balincourt's Uphill and Downhill are far from traditional.

Julien employs a touch of the Giorgio de Chirico metaphysical style to a work that has an uncertain, but real, Afrocentric, even Afrofuturist, power and de Balincourt touches on one of our time's hot topics. Protest, the right to protest, and counter-protest.