PRESENTATION: Sean Scully-The Shadow of Figuration

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 Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

“The Shadow of Figuration” brings together large-scale paintings from the artist’s most formative series,  including “Wall of Light” and “Landline”, as well as a selection of watercolors. Alongside paintings and works on paper, a monumental sculpture titled Indoor Sleeper (2020) will be presented in the gallery’s outdoor space, offering an insight into Scully’s sculptural practice. For his “Wall of Light” series, begun in 1998, Scully arranges vertical and horizontal blocks of color to form pictorial architectures reminiscent of the brickwork of solid stone walls. Dark tones, which evoke compact wooden beams, are alternated with contrasting, brighter colors, conglomerating to form erratic units within the compositions. Scully has observed, ‘the wall is a barrier but what I’m doing is dissolving it. It is metaphysical, transformative’. The variations in hues and brightness emulate impressions of light, while also creating a sense of tension or motion; the thick layers of paint ‘push each other, but at the same time make room for each other’, as the artist has stated. At the seams or fissures, where the fields of colour collide, deeper layers beneath the paint are exposed. The “Wall of Light” works in the exhibition feature a spectrum of colors, such as reds, blues and greens in varying intensities. They are characterised, however, by a strong use of yellow, a color Scully has described as complicated, but which he has fallen in love with recently in light of the current state of the world: “I’m not sure I understand why, though maybe yellow offers a kind of protection against the cold”. While the “Wall of Light” works take inspiration from an urban context, Scully’s “Landline” series, which begun in 2013,  was originally inspired by a photograph the artist took in Norfolk, which captured the interplay between grassy land, the North Sea and an overcast sky layered in horizontal lines. This series shows a certain shift in Scully’s practice, for the composition of these works is informed by the parameters of the natural world, marking a departure from the predominant geometrical structure. Painted in oil on an aluminium surface, the layered stripes of color evoke the geometry of nature while highlighting Scully’s distinct use of materials, which respond to paint in different ways. For the work “Landline Tierra Primavera” (2022), Scully adopted a warm, rich palette, borrowing hues reminiscent of European painters such Gustave Courbet while the varied green tones of “Landline Verdant Dark F.26.22” (2022) recall the colors of foliage or dark forests, reminiscent of the Romantic landscape paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. For his “Wall Landline” series, Scully combines the “Wall of Light” and “Landline” series by embedding a painting within a painting, thereby preventing a reading of the surface as unified. Rather, these works can be understood as the combination of two individual pictorial systems – a brick motif suspended or encased in thickly applied, horizontal stripes of landscape. Brought together through the interplay of colors, the series underlines his continuous sculptural and architectural approach to painting; ‘the relationships don’t make sense in terms of logic, they make sense in terms of feeling’. The gradations of tone and combinations of colors allow for a sensorial and emotional impact, enhanced by the shimmering effect of the metal.

Photo: Sean Scully. Wall Paris Blue, 2021. Oil on linen. 193 x 193 x 7.6 cm (76 x 76 x 3 in), © Sean Scully. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein, Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 23/7-24/9/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net