Sean Scully

David McKee Gallery, New York
Galerie Lelong, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2004

Maurice Poirier, Sean Scully, New York 1990, n.p., no. 117, illustrated in colour
David Carrier, Sean Scully, London 2004, p. 21, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the reds are deeper and richer with slightly more orange tones throughout in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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The perfectly square outline, monumental geometric composition, and spellbinding colour of Sean Scully's Backwards Forwards combine to deliver an inspirational visual experience. Perfectly encasing this artist's iconic aesthetic language, the present work is strikingly powerful with the sumptuous hues and colour bands working in binaries to build a simply stunning architecture. The four black and white elements are in fact separate blocks that have been embedded into precisely cut holes in the larger canvas. Their positions bestride the boundary edges of the wider colour bands, thereby arranging the four black and red rectangular shapes into two pairs. Furthermore, the contrasting directions of their narrower monochrome stripes also work in two different pair sets.  By setting off the colours and shapes in pairs in this way the artist invokes the divergent meaning and connotations of the title Backwards Forwards. The order of these two words implies regression followed by progression, but the absence of any descriptive conjunction, namely 'and', makes the title more ambiguous. Of course, the combined forces of backwards and forwards in equal measure results in perfect stasis, an unmoving equilibrium that is evoked by the physical interlocking of the smaller bricks inside the larger canvas and the overall gridlocked balance of the directional opposition.

 

Using a five inch brush and oil paints thickened with varnish, Scully builds up his compositions gradually, applying multiple layers of paint to emphasise the presence of the artist's hand. The built-up paint strata of this work construct fascinating brick-like structures: the intense reds commune solidity and presence while the whites, full of movement, suggest an ethereal transience, and the light-absorbing depthless blacks create void-like absences. The feathered and scumbled edges of his blocks create joins that are like the fault lines between tectonic plates, where friction between the different forms ignites the composition. Like light seeping through the cracks in a wall or clapboards of a cabin, the precedent of previous pigment layers peek through successive films, like forensic clues to the genesis of the painting's creation.

 

Born in Ireland, Scully studied in London before settling in New York, the cradle of Abstract Expressionism, in 1975. An itinerant artist, he has studios in New York, London, Munich and Barcelona and the different atmospheres of those places feeds into the paintings that he makes there. With monumental canvases Scully streams together a unique range of influence, taking in the formal traditions of European painting; the brooding, rich tones of the High Renaissance and Mannerism; the American abstract tradition of Rothko, Newman and Pollock; and the pared down aesthetic of Minimalism.

 

For Scully, black is a coda for the traditional Spanish painting that he adores, from Velasquez to Goya, and is present here in the two larger slabs and black lines that repeat through the four masonry-like quadrangles punctuating the composition. Like the Spanish Old Masters, he is concerned with brushstrokes and the touch of the human hand that reveals the artist's hesitations, his thought processes and vulnerabilities. In addition, he admits the heroic and solitary approach of post-war painting as his direct heritage and acknowledges a special affinity with the work of Mark Rothko. In Rothko's paintings, pigments bleed into the permeable textures of canvas to create an intangible dynamic between light and dark and conjure moody, melancholic dramas. Of his predecessor's work Scully has said "The sky and the sea, as well as all the experiences the artist has lived and all the stories he would like to tell are distilled into rectangles that have the solemnity of Stonehenge" (The artist cited in Michael Auping, 'No Longer a Wall' in Exhibition Catalogue, Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, 2005-06, p. 24). However, comparing the oeuvres of these two titans of Abstraction, it is the character of Scully's geometric shapes that greater possess not only the architectural solemnity of structures like Stone Henge, but also the implicit and resonant mystery that is carried within these ancient vessels of history. Whereas Rothko's magnificent canvases are imbued with overwhelming emotional energy, the stoic geometry of Scully's paintings, as exemplified in Backwards Forwards, entomb the shadows of memory and experience.

 

Ultimately Scully's aesthetic dialect is inimitable and unconditionally his own. Although he enlists the glossy palette of the Old Masters, his colours are unconstrained by specific narrative or an esoteric cipher of symbolism. Although formally reminiscent of American Minimalism, his titling and emphasis on manufacture is diametrically opposed to the oblique titles, impersonal fabrication and non-referential abstraction of Minimalism. Like Rothko, Scully has evolved his own abstract language of rectangular brick-like forms that fit closely together and are characterised by broad brushstrokes, but the nature of his paint is more sculptural, his surfaces more haptic, and his ideological project more focused and less poetically comprehensive. Whereas Rothko presents all-encompassing universality in which the viewer seeks out their own individual resonance, Scully provides something more specific that acts as a metaphorical template for more universal significance, an equation epitomised in the sublime Backwards Forwards. Rooted in the specific semiotic index of the artist, the title Backwards Forwards affords a variety of interpretations, beginning the process of entirely independent ontological response to this astonishing work for each individual viewer.