Sean Scully: Wall of Light

by Titus OBrien May 2, 2006

The first time I saw Sean Scully’s mammoth exhibition Wall of Light at the Ft. Worth Modern, it brought on a splitting headache. Maybe it was really not having had lunch in time, or some other errant disturbance of chi. But I just could not look at those paintings. Room after room of boring, dun-colored pictures of stripes, it appeared to me — even though I have admired his work in the past. I practically ran through the galleries, wondering what Michael Auping was trying to legitimize now.

Sean Scully...Wall of Light Desert Night, 1999...Oil on canvas...108 x 132 inches...Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth...Museum Purchase


This is why it is always good to go back and take a second or third look, and not be too invested in a particular position. While the Modern calls him “one of the most admired painters working today,” I have heard Scully bashed from coast to coast and on three continents. People love to discount this man’s work, especially younger artists. Against a nearly unanimous tide of critical opposition, and even against my first reaction to this show, I surprisingly find myself now standing firmly in defense of Sean Scully. He is known of course as “the guy who paints blocky stripes” (or stripe-y blocks.) I was a bit stunned to find his brick-like rectangles poetically cutting to the meaty bone of what painting actually is after 100 years of non-objective abstraction and conceptual expansion.

As you top the steps heading to the show, you’re greeted by that extraordinary, huge, green, late Warhol self-portrait. The contrast is an important one. Pop art and its prolific progeny are essentially conceptual gestures that bounce around in the mind; basically one-liners, no matter how clever or resonant. Time is not really a component in the actual experience, nor is the body. As pleasing a wall decoration as they might be or important as social/historical phenomena, Warhol’s soup cans, a Lichtenstein cartoon, or Koons porn don’t require much time to grok. You get it, you smile, you move on, maybe continuing to think about it later (or with the latter, try to forget.) Damien Hirst’s rapidly disintegrating shark in person is by all accounts a deeply disappointing reality. You’re better off with the page in the art history survey. It really was a great idea.

As metaphysical as its implications may be, Scully’s work is almost purely physical, at least in comparison. This is not art to be experienced as a jpeg or in a catalog. These are paintings about painting. But even that implies a distance, an operative ‘concept’ (à la Ryman’s “painting the paint”) and such a separation is non-existent here. It’s heavy Dionysus, believe it or not, rather than Apollo: more romantic than classical (also distinguishing him from Agnes Martin’s similarly rectilinear operation). What you see is what you physically get — color, gesture, mark, brushstroke, touch, and time itself — but the whole is much more than the sum of its standard painterly parts.

Sean Scully... Wall of Light Beach, 2001...Oil on canvas...40 x 50 inches...Private collection


Scully did arrive at an operative conceit some decades ago. He would paint stripes, he would build with blocks. Perhaps this freed him from further stylistic concerns, liberating him to concentrate on other matters in the work. History has freed him from having to defend the simplicity, repetition, or format (though some of those “sculptural canvases” from the 80s are indefensible). I find myself appreciating the gravitas (maybe it’s what gave me the headache before.) Each work feels labored, but not leaden. All art tells a story, if simply because our hearts demand one, and the story here is largely about the construction of the work. One can’t help but begin to trace and relive long hours spent painting, stepping back, correcting, painting, stepping back, scraping, painting, stepping back, until the hand-built result starts to sing its own song, intuitively demanding its structure be allowed a unique birth. Blocks of paint painted over other blocks of paint, layer after layer, colors left peeking through, the spaces between a hundred ochres and a thousand grays becoming zippers and vectors ignited by hot pinks, vivid blues, emerald greens, and crimson reds. The source, the ground, is masked and nearly hidden, but evident and shining through here and there. I found it all a powerful existential metaphor.

I’ve become fond of the phrase “visual intelligence,” the development of which becomes an excuse to teach art to students like mine, few of whom will likely become professional artists. When you set to making a picture, writing a song, story, book, etc, the question you may pose at the start will find its own often surprising solution. With Scully’s paintings you bear witness to a process that may begin with a reflection about a place, to be executed on a certain scale. The operation’s parameters set up, the work makes its own demands, has its own laws. An instructive, honed visual intelligence is palpable in these finished works, a satisfying “suchness” to borrow a Buddhist phrase, and the actual variety of results within his self-imposed constraints is stunning. But it takes a perceptual shift.

Sean Scully...Pale White Wall, 2002...Oil on canvas...60 x 70 inches...Private collection


Yes, it’s all blocks. It defies memory in that sense, and expectation. The mind says “I know what this is. Brown stripes. Move along.” But you can’t walk away having easily digested and commodified the work. You can remember “stripes,” and a color combination here or there. But in their presence, you have to mentally and physically allow an experience, actually intuitively feel the paintings. I fear few people are equipped or willing to permit such a thing to occur (though he seems to be doing just fine, so perhaps my worry is misguided.)

With studios in five countries or something (while I wonder how that works exactly,) I appreciate that Scully’s work does seem to be very much about this planet Earth, the light and the soil of distinctly different places upon it. The titles sometimes refer to them, and one can almost catch a whiff or feel the atmosphere of Barcelona, Alba, Mexico, or Chelsea. We’ve all had the experience of traveling and returning, our senses refreshed coming and going, as they encounter the differences. I am sure his country-hopping lends his sensibility a vividness that informs the sense of place in the paintings.

I found myself grounded in my own body as I stood in relation to the work, which ranges enormously in scale. Everything somehow feels anatomically right, with some units the size of the entire body and seeming to almost weigh as much, while others are more like a hand, or a limb, or Zen garden stone, placed just so. I have rarely seen a show so well placed and lit, with works in such engaged discourse with one another. Tadao Ando’s building, as usual, looks tailor-fitted.

Art today often seems lost in the rush of the new, the hunt for the hottest young phenom, sensation, or curatorial premise. Ignoring trends as he seems to, one could label Scully obtuse and unfashionable (which he certainly has been), but I found my appreciation of this show undeniable, despite preconceptions. At this point in (post)history, perhaps we of all people need to reminded to slow down, to notice the light of our homelands, of our place. Reminded to sometimes feel the weight of our bones, smell the fecund earth, contemplate ancient and heavy things. He says this body of paintings is about “architecture and light.” We too are built of dense physical matter, but born of, sustained by, and destined to return to light. The artist has managed to create a powerful, poetic testament and apology for the subtle powers of art, and pure abstraction, in our time.

Images courtesy the artist and the Fort Worth Modern.

Titus O"Brien is an artist and writer currently living in Dallas.

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