Sean Scully, a spirit in the grid

Barcelona,

Mondrian, Rothko and Matisse are among the basic aesthetic influences of the Irish, nationalized American, Sean Scully, whose iconographic repertoire consists of lines, bands and blocks that give rise to optical and relief illusions through their serial and superimposed structure. They are grouped into alternative orders and in them figure and background with difficulty can be differentiated. The treatment of color in its production is also the result of an entire artisanal process: the progressive overlap of fine layers impregnated with different pigments that are revealed by transparency and offer unique, large -depth tones, which grants its abstract paintings a certain sensual warmth.

One of its most complete retrospective can be contemplated, until next summer, in the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera under the commissioner of Javier Molins: it brings together just over sixty works representative of its evolution from its figurative beginnings to its last compositions, passing through the most famous of their career, the minimalists of the seventies; These are paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs, mostly under the common denominator of the use of those chromatic blocks with whose textures and lines Scully wants to prove that the coldness of abstraction has a lot of myth and that the only resource of the basic elements of the painting, under certain conditions of rhythm and intensity, can raise deep emotions.

It will allow us to verify this project both the extensive knowledge of Scully of the ancient teachers and their unique sensitivity when taking references, visual and emotional, in its close environment; Also the internal coherence of their creations in time and its relationship with their vital experiences, affections and pains.

Sean Scully. Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera

Before adopting recurrent procedures such as the tripartite division of their pieces, the use of stripes instead of orthogonal schemes and the alternation between colored areas and others in black and white, in front of monochromatism, Scully handled a rigorous synthesis of landscape references. In his first dives in non -figuration, he analyzed the possibility of using the grid as the only compositional module from a dense game of overlays and trying to approach the usual schemes in Piet Mondrian. Gradually, the compositional tension of his images relaxed and chromatism was refined, in a precise counterpoint between daring tones and delicate nuances. Other of their honoree would be Van Gogh, Malevich and Matisse, the latter in his cheerful palette and vibrant light.

One of the most interesting aspects of his work is INSETScompositions formed by canvases painted with contrasting motifs, physically embedded in the body of the painting, or their works based on the handling of light reflexes and the mutations that it generates on the walls. His inspiration for these projects came in Mexico, but would photograph walls also illuminated in other parts of the world: he sought to combine, as many times, pictorial drama and delicacy. In fact, when it uses a gray tone similar to that of steel, it is carried away by the memory of the melancholic light that surrounds its study in Kentish Town, an area of northern London.

Scully quotes the “constable muscle light” as another key source for its ultimate production: it shares with that great landscape its interest in capturing the specific atmospheric conditions of specific places at certain times; We can say that reinvents, from their non -figurative language, the pastoral scenes of the architect of The hay car. In some of the creations collected in La Pedrera we will find subtly motley blocks or stripes, in blue, red, green and purple, on diverse supports: copper, aluminum and linen. The tonal modulations imbute the pieces of a luminosity that is nourished, not only of constable, but of the tradition of the European landscape as a whole; The artist has referred to his eagerness to combine two currents normally distanced in historiographic studies: the rational or enlightened and the romantic.

By visible the procedural nature of his works, he wants to encapsulate the transient and always changing quality of environmental lighting, so that, as described by Hans-Joachim Müller art critic, each composition has “its own climate, its own emotional profile”. Another of its frequent starting points is musical serialism, a method that consists of repeating musical elements by adding variations in tone, dynamics and timbre. When transferring that procedure to its pictorial compositions, it repeated the reason for the horizon line five or six times in each case, incorporating changes in tonal modulations and gestures. Although it is easy to remember, before these works, Rothko’s color fields, Scully claims a fundamental distinction between the invocation of the sublime persecuted by American abstract expressionists and their own practice, which addresses contemporary existential relations with the environment through a suggestion of telluric in horizontal lines. The Irishman believes that by abstracting our relationship with nature we have made it more remote, so his challenge in these paintings has been to bring them closer to that nature without giving up their abstract language.

Since this author resided for a while in Barcelona and here he maintained a study for fourteen years, some of the works that he then carried out in the Catalan capital will be part of this anthology, such as Barcelona Band of Light (2004) and Barcelona Dark Wall (2004), in addition to paper and photographs; Among its sculptures that are now exhibited for the first time it stands out 55large six meter high color column that receives visitors in the Passeig patio in Gràcia and that, once again, states that simplicity and repetition can sprout a high suggestion capacity.

As usual, this exhibition of La Pedrera will also expand beyond the walls of the Gaudí building: activities have been organized along with the great theater of the Liceu, the Palau de la Música and Santa Cecília de Montserrat and the filmmaker David Trueba has filmed a documentary in his London workshop where he talks with Scully and documents the preparation of this assembly.