Sean Scully's signature use of lines of colour has yielded a remarkable expressive range, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
In 1981, art critic Joseph Mascheck invited Sean Scully to take part in a section of an exhibition he was curating. The show, Critical Perspectives, opened at the innovative New York venue, P.S.1, in Queens, in January, 1982. In it, a number of critics were given a room each in which to offer their slant on the state of contemporary art. Maschek was a known proponent of abstract art and, unsurprisingly, the artists he invited were abstract painters.
At that stage, Scully had been based in the US for about six years or so. Born in Dublin in 1945, he'd grown up in London. Having built up the beginnings of what looked to be a promising, viable career as a painter in England, he had chosen to abandon it and move across the Atlantic to start from scratch. But while he had, since that time, attracted the admiration and friendship of a number of people in the art world and beyond, in professional terms he was still very much struggling. He was a fighter and had known New York was going to be tough.
It was an odd, uncertain moment in the art world. Besides the waning strength of minimalism, there was a surprising international resurgence of expressionist, representational painting, not to mention the varied claims of conceptualism, new media and performance art. Since his arrival in Manhattan, minimalism was the movement Scully was closest to. In a way, the paintings he'd been making, severely geometric, monochromatic compositions, built up from regular bands of narrow stripes, were not strictly minimalist but pursued a dialogue or perhaps an argument with minimalism.
There was, to use one of Scully's favourite words, a relentless quality to his determined exploration of extremely narrow means. And perhaps something defensive. He has spoken of how he felt a need to armour himself against the Manhattan art world. But when Maschek issued his invitation, he was on the verge of a decisive change in his work. He was also a bit dispirited. All these various factors contributed to what he came up with for the exhibition, which was a bit of a surprise for everyone, perhaps even himself.
He showed just one painting, Backs and Fronts, an enormous, composite work, 20 feet long by eight feet high. Its constituent panels, tall oblongs of irregular heights, were painted in striped patterns, vertical and horizontal, thick and thin. But they were painted by hand, without benefit of masking tape, and they deliberately evidenced the fallibility of the human touch. They were also coloured: rich yellows, pinks, oranges, reds, blues. Anchored by bands of black and grey, the work had a certain gravitas, but also a rhythmic exuberance. As the title implies, it encapsulated a number of oppositions: tough and tender, strong and vulnerable, heavy and light.
David Carrier, a critic and longtime friend of the artist, describes Backs and Fronts in his lavishly illustrated new book, Sean Scully, as the decisive moment both in his development as an artist and, in the public sphere, in his career as a painter.
Within the space of this one work he had established the foundations of his mature style - and established himself as a formidable presence in the art world.
Carrier explains very clearly the significance of the painting for Scully. It was not so much a case of moving forward into new territory per se, as finding a way to acknowledge through painting certain things that had shaped and nurtured his sensibility. That is, for the first time his own personal experience, his own perceptions and priorities determined and formed the substance of his painting, and the result was not so much a conclusion as an extraordinary liberation. It opened the way to a number of significant developments, all of them building on the basic expressive language he had established.
Carrier carefully maps out what some of those personal priorities are. For example, Scully's long appreciation of rhythm 'n' blues music is there in terms of rhythm and colour. Equally, his feeling for cities comes through, but in several different ways, some not so obvious. It's there in his liking for grids, in his relish for the colours and tones that relate to the fall of light on buildings. But he is also drawn to the abrupt, arbitrary patterning of city streets and facades, the jolting collisions of architectural detail and colour. He likes the worn, impoverished textures that are inextricable parts of urban life.
Here, he parts company with mainstream modernism. Where there is a Utopian thrust to the rationalist abstractions of De Stijl, Scully's paintings will have none of it. Not that they are dystopian. Their bruised, wary surfaces find an unexpected beauty in overlooked corners, in functional things, in the pragmatism of daily living rather than idealised theoretical programmes.
"I see a sort of urban romance in the makeshifts people use to keep a place like Manhattan together, though of course that is the point - it doesn't exactly hold together. It's not self-contained."
Throughout the 1980s Scully worked with a number of formats, with very massive, deep stretchers, with variously proportioned composites and with panels physically inserted into canvases, like windows - in fact he compares them to the bricked-up windows in the sides of buildings. All the time, however, the stripe has been his basic unit of pictorial construction, with a checkerboard grid an occasional variation. It's a simple formal language, relatively speaking, but one that has yielded a remarkable expressive range.
While there is a sculptural quality to some of his 1980s composite works - last year he actually made a sculpture, Wall of Light, for the University of Limerick - he sees himself as a painter. He has been unusually forthright in speaking in defence of painting, something that is necessary, he feels, because of the implicit antagonism towards it shown by large sections of the art world.
Part of being a painter, as he sees it, has to do with the careful limitations of means of expression. Although he is certainly not an abstract formalist, he thinks it is wrong, for example, to borrow the trappings of new media to make painting notionally more appealing to a technologically-minded audience. He has nothing against photography. In fact, photography has become an aspect of his exhibited work, and his photographs of buildings in Mexico, Morocco, New York and Barcelona clearly relate to his painting.
It's notable that, in the latter half of the 1990s he tended to simplify his means even more, making his ongoing Wall of Light series without recourse to insets or composites and with a very simple block-work pattern. Yet, the series includes many paintings that are certainly among his best works. His paintings, and hence Scully himself, have an assertive, even truculent presence, something that irks some people.
Although he spent just the first few years of his life in Dublin, he is extremely attached to Ireland. While he has a base in New York, and is currently spending most of his time between Barcelona and Munich, where he is Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, in an odd way Ireland is central to his orientation, occupying the position of a homeland. Which is partly why he is making a gift of seven paintings and two pastels to the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane. It's fitting that the best abstract painter of his generation should be strongly represented in the city of his birth.
Sean Scully, by David Carrier, is published by Thames & Hudson (£42).
An exhibition of new work by Sean Scully opens in the Kerlin Gallery next Wednesday and runs until May 1st