Sean Scully, rational and romantic

Seoul,

Throughout his nearly half-century-long career, Sean Scully has drawn on traits of European and North American abstraction to generate a broad body of work that is halfway between the search for pictorial drama and delicacy.

Following the traveling retrospective that the Philadelphia Museum of Art offered him in 2022, Thaddaeus Ropac will present in Seoul, starting next September, a selection of new works by the Irishman from his series Wall of Light and Landlinein an exhibition called “Soul,” a term that implies a play on words – a tradition, by the way, in the author’s country of origin – between the city that hosts the exhibition and the nature of Scully’s paintings themselves, a spirit that, he has reflected, is the only thing we really possess, since everything else would be rented, even the body.

The artist’s formal investigations have been, and continue to be, based on the use of stripes and blocks; in the new pieces that we will be able to see in Seoul, created after his recent return to London, he has also used a steel-like grey tone to evoke the melancholic light that surrounds his studio in Kentish Town, an area in the north of the British capital to which the composition refers. Kentish Town Blue Red (2024), from the aforementioned series Wall of Light.

Along with the influence of that urban environment itself, Scully cites Constable’s “muscular light” as another key inspiration for his later work: he shares with that great landscape artist his interest in capturing the specific atmospheric conditions of specific places at specific times; we can say that he reinvents, from his non-figurative language, the pastoral scenes of the artist of The hay wagon. In the works collected in Thaddaeus Ropac we find blocks or subtly variegated stripes, in blue, red, green and purple, on various supports: copper, aluminium and linen. The tonal modulations imbue the pieces with a luminosity that is nourished not only by Constable, but by the tradition of the European landscape as a whole; the artist has referred to his desire to unite two currents that are normally separated in historiographical studies: the rational or enlightened and the romantic.

The expression of light through chromatic nuances is the axis of the whole Wall of Lightwhich the artist began precisely after observing how natural light was reflected on the stacked stones in Mayan constructions in the Mexican Yucatan: its filtration through the vertical and horizontal blocks, arranged in irregular formations, which leave gaps between them through which the sun’s rays filter. His use of pigment in this series has been increasingly expressive and free: we can detect underlying layers of paint under superimposed brushstrokes.

By making visible the processual nature of her works, Scully wants to encapsulate the transient, ever-changing quality of ambient light, so that, as art critic Hans-Joachim Müller has described, each composition has “its own mood, its own emotional profile.” If in Wall London Green (2024) arranges the yellow of the sun together with a spring green and a pink that evokes the warm light of a summer day, the peaches and oranges that simmer between the blocks of Kentish Town Blue Red They seem to be taken from the burnt colors of the sunset.

As to Landlinehis starting point is musical serialism, a method of composition that consists of repeating musical elements adding variations in tone, dynamics and timbre. When transferring this procedure to his pictorial compositions, he repeated the motif of the horizon line five or six times in each case, incorporating variations in tonal modulations and gestures. Although it is easy to recall, when looking at these works, Rothko’s color fields, Scully claims a fundamental distinction between the invocation of the sublime pursued by the American abstract expressionists and his own practice, which addresses contemporary existential relationships with the environment through a suggestion of the 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 renouncing its abstract language.

Those who wish to enjoy the work of this author at a closer distance can visit the Church of Saint Nicholas in Caen, until 22 September, or the Château d’Oiron in Plaine-et-Vallées, which is exhibiting his paintings, sculptures and works on paper and, since the end of the year, also a monumental stone sculpture in the form of a tower, which can be seen permanently.

Marked by their deep relationship with the place where they were created, each piece comes to reflect on the close interweaving of personal experience and formal research that continues to sustain Scully’s artistic practice. In her words, Your sense of color is like your singing voice: it comes from your spirit.