IF you've walked through a city at twilight on a sunny day, with the sky still bright and the darkening streets washed with neon from shop signs, you'll know all about what filmmakers call "the magic hour" – those precious minutes when the light seems to take on a luminous quality.

It isn't just filmmakers who are in thrall to the magic hour, either. Dundee-born artist and writer David Batchelor has given the name to a sculptural piece included in Light, a group exhibition on that theme currently on display at London's Hayward Gallery. "It's all about that glow and that shift into dusk when the colour really starts burning," he says. "I love that."

Batchelor, who cites films like Blade Runner and Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love as influences and who calls The Wizard Of Oz "the best essay on colour of all time", describes the retro-futuristic qualities of his beloved neon as "yesterday's tomorrow". It's a neat phrase and indeed much of his sculptural work involves using it to highlight the shapes and textures of found objects, often ones with an industrial past.

But more than light, Batchelor's driving obsession is with colour, in particular what he calls the "artificial" colours of the city. In one sense, he says, it's a reaction against a tradition in British art which associates colour with the Scottish Colourists or the St Ives school of painters. It's also a nod towards those modern art movements which are largely about the city: Impressionism, Modernism and Pop Art.

"It's urban colours that interest me, spraypaints particularly," he says. "It's the metallic colours you might find on a car rather than the subtle shades of a leafy tree - I tend to use quite acid, sharp colours. Colours which are very noticeable rather than soft or modulated. There are certain pinks, greens and yellows that I tend to find myself reaching for over and over again."

It's these concerns – and many of these colours – which are laid out in Flatlands, an exhibition of 199 two-dimensional works opening next month at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery. It will be the 57-year-old's biggest solo UK show to date and, though he left Dundee for Canada as a baby and later moved to England where he grew up, he thinks it's appropriate that it be held in Scotland.

In fact the "born in Dundee" tag is a legacy of his inclusion in the 2000 British Art Show, the five-yearly survey of the best of British art which that year kicked off in Edinburgh. "They were very keen on counting how many Scottish artists were in the show, so ever since then I've been Scottish. But my wife's Scottish, we travel to Scotland a lot and I've had a really good relationship with Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I've done lots of work there."

A self-confessed stationary geek – graph paper and highlighter pens are among his favourite artistic materials – Batchelor has long made two-dimensional works, though often as an adjunct to his sculpture in the form of technical diagrams or as a means of recording how a piece is made in a certain venue.

Included in the Edinburgh show, for instance, is one of his studies for a 2005 installation he created in Gloucester Road tube station in London, a strange experience which saw him pulling a midnight-to-5am shift and sharing his trackside art project with that unseen army of cleaners, maintenance staff and foxes that populate the Underground at night.

More recently, however, he has started making "blob paintings" and a selection of these will be exhibited in the Edinburgh show. They're made by pouring gloss household paint onto aluminium sheets and then, when these have dried, adding a block of grey-black so that it nudges up against the edge of the resulting blob. Chance, though, plays an important part in the process.

"Whenever you're using fluid materials you can never completely control what they're going to do," says Batchelor. "In any studio there's a degree of chance so it's a question of whether you go with it or try to prevent it. For me, particularly with the blob paintings, part of the pleasure is knowing that I can't completely control it. You have an idea of how you want it to turn out but you always end up chasing the blob."

He never knows how they will dry, either, or how long they will take to do it. Sometimes it's days, sometimes weeks and the temperature of his studio seems to have nothing to do with it. Mostly the surface of the paintings pucker and crinkle, but not always.

Batchelor has also been making drawings of what he calls "fantasy sculptures – things that not only wouldn't be made but couldn't be made because they're sculptures of pure unsupported colour". In Flatlands these are represented by a series called Atomic Drawings.

Any artist with an interest in abstraction, whose subject is colour and the city, is bound to be drawn to the biggest and most vivid examples of urban living on the planet – the sort of lurid metropolis Ridley Scott shows us in Blade Runner. "The best one for architecture and illuminated colour is Hong Kong," Batchelor says. "It's amazing how they throw colour onto every single building. It's like Las Vegas."

Batchelor has also visited or exhibited in Seoul, Berlin, Beijing, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and Madrid. But if he has a home-from-home, it's the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janiero and Sao Paolo, where the architectural and artistic flowering of the post-war period has left an appetite for exactly the sort of work he makes. He first exhibited there a decade ago and has returned every year since.

"It's one of those places where things just came together," he says. "There's a relationship in Brazil between a sense of the urban space on one hand, and abstraction and colour on the other. And that's the triangle I work within. I didn't know it the first time I showed there but I noticed quickly that my work seemed to fit in well."

Making art isn't Batchelor's only preoccupation. He's also a senior tutor in critical theory at the Royal College of Art in London and is the author of several books. In one of them, Chromophobia, he tackles what he sees as a fear of colour in Western culture and the way in which attempts have been made to strip it of its power – and he offers a manifesto of sorts for resistance.

"The thing about colour is it's everywhere and you never know where the next interesting bit is going to come from," he says. "In that sense it's very democratic. Artists can't claim a privileged relationship with it any more than neuroscientists or philosophers or fashion designers can."

True? Maybe, maybe not. After all, French artist Yves Klein did develop a new deep blue coloured paint in conjunction with pharmaceutical company Rhône-Poulenc in 1960. The resulting hue now carries his name, a rare privilege indeed. So if Batchlor had to have a colour named after him, what would it be? He gives a wry laugh.

"That sounds like a clever way of asking a question I'm always asked when I'm giving a talk which is: 'What's your favourite colour?' I can set my watch by it. It's a slightly daft question so I have to give a slightly daft answer: I always say Pantone 292."

To save you the troubling of Googling it, it's a shade of light blue known as Columbia – or, if you prefer, the colour of the city sky at dusk, just as the magic hour starts.

David Batchelor: Flatlands is at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from May 4-July 14, www.fruitmarket.co.uk. The artist is in conversation with exhibition curator Andrea Schlieker on May 8 at 6.30pm