ART CITIES:Paris-Sean Scully

Over the course of his 50-year career, Sean Scully has created an influential body of work that has marked the development of contemporary abstraction. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, his work combines painterly drama with great visual delicacy. Often structured around stripes or layered blocks of colour arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, the layers in his paintings attain a fine balance between calm reflection and an intrinsic vitality.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

Created for the most part during the pandemic, the paintings in Sean Scully’s solo exhibition “Entre ciel et terre” suggest a connection with nature and an inner world of memory in troubled times. As the translated exhibition title “Entre ciel et terre”  [Between Heaven and Earth], indicates, Sean Scully’s art hovers between two realms, that of the terrestrial, conveying a sense of materiality, rawness and sensuality and that of the celestial, by opening onto the infinite. The exhibition presents for the first time Sean Scully’s new “Mirroring” series. Painted in oil on aluminium, the large-scale works are divided into two sets of color stripes that mirror each other with variations. Between each color field, the artist has left the metal surface apparent. The overall composition with the rhythm of the horizontal bands bring to mind the pages of a book or a musical score. In the “Wall of Light” works the bands of color are interlaced. They are painted in a warm or grey palette in different sizes and materials notably on linen but also aluminium and copper. The exhibition presents a selection of “Landline” paintings with layered greys and blues, and an Inset painting in which the horizon lines have been ruptured by a black square. This iconoclastic gesture may express the lack of perspective in darkened times. Although they are strongly abstract, Sean Scully’s paintings are informed by life, experience and sensation. The “Mirroring” series is linked to Sean Scully’s early double canvases from the 1980s, two conjoined panels that create a sense of imperfect mirroring. In the new series, the paired composition is disrupted by areas of the metal surface left apparent. In the “Wall of Light” series, started in 1998, Sean Scully plays with opposites, as suggested by the title. The arranged color blocks rendered with thick layers of paint could evoke solid stone walls, while the variations in hues and brightness emulate impressions of light. “Landline Rising Blue” (2018) forms part of the “Landline” series that has been at the heart of Sean Scully’s practice for the past decade. The works were originally inspired by a photograph that the artist took of a seascape from a cliff in Norfolk, England. Two examples of Inset works also are on view, “Black Window Pale Land” (2020) and “Wall Landline Dark Yellow” (2021). Both composed of rectangular cut-outs, the paintings demonstrate Sean Scully’s continuous architectural and sculptural approach. “Black Window Pale Land” features horizontal stripes with a window-like, black square inset, while “Wall Landline Dark Yellow” embeds a colorful “Wall of Light” painting. The works made this year, “Star, Wall Landline Dark Yellow” and “Wall Teal” (2021), reveal the artist’s draw to painterly visions of the South of France through Vincent Van Gogh’s palette of yellows and blues.

Photo: Sean Scully, Mirroring Green, 2020, Oil on aluminium, 250 x 400 cm / 98,43 x 157,48 in, Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein, © Sean Scully, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 24/4-12/6/2021, Days & Hours: contact for appointment here, https://ropac.net