There is no such thing as abstract painting, especially for Sean Scully. His paintings are about life, about emotion and melancholy, they depict that nether world between what you see and what you know, between remembrance and desire, that nebulous horizon between the darkening sea and the evening sky. The paintings in this exhibit are mostly watercolors, and they are extraordinary.
Apparently I’m one of the few people in the world who had never heard of Sean Scully until friends told me of an exhibit of his at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara. Born in Ireland and raised in London, Scully lived and exhibited for many years in New York City before spending time in Mexico in the 80’s and early 90’s. He now divides his time between New York and Bavaria with shows spanning the globe. It is this in-between world hovering between traditional European representational painting and the American world of abstraction that Scully occupies.
"This one is inspired by an old house painted in pink, bothered by the sun," Scully says, "it has lost its color but gained a kind of nobility." The colors are muted, a little dirty, bothered by life. These are the houses of the village, adobe walls with doors and windows spattered with mud, long dark shadows moving slowly across sun drenched walls, the stacked stone blocks of Mayan ruins washed in the dust of millennia. The colors seem to reflect the passage of time, the effect of the steaming rains and the unrelenting sun, the presence of the past. It would be impossible to describe Mexico without talking about color; the aging ochers and papal burgundies of the Spanish colonial homes that line the cobbled streets of San Miguel de Allende, or the hillside homes of Guanajuato spilling over with every color that could possibly tumble from a box of pastels, or the architecture of Luis Barragán where broad walls of vivid pink play against the luminous blue of the sky and the undulating turquoise of a horse pool, and so it is with Sean Scully's work. This is the beginning of a series that Scully would call Muro de Luz or "Wall of Light".
The color theories of Goethe that so influenced Turner and Delacroix are evident in Sean Scully's work. He is, above all, an extraordinary colorist and a master of composition but this is not the labored, intellectual precision of Josef Albers or Franz Klein, or the sedentary and passive absorptions of Mark Rothko. This is physical, this is emotional.
There are also several oil paintings in this exhibit and, like Whistler's Nocturne series, or Monet's paintings of the Thames, Scully's paintings pay homage to JMW Turner's unbridled passion and uncanny ability to capture light. He paints in large blocks of vertical and horizontal color with broad, muscular brushstrokes spontaneously applied that give his paintings tremendous movement, vitality, and energy. The effect is almost that of a magnified series of Impressionist brushstrokes where the eye as much as the brush, mixes the color and blends the form from the abstract to the representational.
Scully’s painting are not figurative, but like a digitized photograph you get the sense that if you were to stand far enough away, if you allowed enough distance intellectually, everything would come into focus. And yet the sensuousness, the layering of the paint, the sumptuous brushstrokes draw you closer, seduce you, the depth of his canvas invites you not to back away, but to step inside. To fully appreciate his paintings perhaps we need to stop thinking for a moment. "We've become too articulate," Scully states, "We take the mystery and power out of things because we explain them away. Sometimes people need to just shut up."
Influences are rarely singular and it’s easy to imagine the influence of Edward Hopper in the depictions of the warmth of a late afternoon sun slanting broadly though an open window casting shadows across adobe walls and an earthen tile floor, the light cascading down the stone steps of an ancient Mayan pyramid, or filtering through the pergola timbers of a Spanish hacienda.
The watercolors in this exhibit, completed during his 10 years or so living in Mexico, are relatively small and they have an intimacy to them, a personal quality that allows a glimpse of the creative process. Some have faint outlines of pencil that loosely define the composition. They lend a draftsman like quality or a loose narrative quality, like a rough draft of a story before the color and vitality are added that bring the story to life, but there is a spontaneity, a vitality and exuberance in them that disregards the lines. Where several paintings are hung together in a series they become paragraphs in a story, or lines of a poem, chords in a melody.
Many of these paintings have an inset panel like a door or a window, an entrance perhaps to a place that lies beyond, another world, or another thought. "A window is a promise", Scully states, "and the door or the window is what keeps the wall from becoming relentless." It’s what allows humanity to intrude on the abstract. It prompts us to think, to wonder what’s behind the door.
When you’ve stepped outside the gallery you’re left with the impression that you’ve seen something more than you actually have, the difference between what you see and what you know. Scully’s paintings appear abstract in form if not in concept, but he is not displeased if you see something representational and although his work has moved inexorably away from the figurative, Scully acknowledges the landscapes, the sunsets, the humanist influences in his work. In his paintings he embraces the cut sod in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the permanence and uncertainty of Finnegan’s Wake, the patterns of the mist shrouded fields and dry stone walls of his native Ireland.
The colors are often muted like a musical chord in a minor key. There’s sometimes a sadness to them, but also a serenity. Maybe that’s why they’re so popular. "They’re an attempt at reparation," Scully says, "They’re not a picture of me – they’re an attempt to reach something better. They’re where I want to be." There’s something supremely soothing about them, like looking out to sea, or gazing across the searing desert to a tiny village in Mexico.
There is a sculpture that sits with an enormous weight in the courtyard adjacent to the gallery entrance. The play of light on the blocks of stone highlights an inherent duality that suggests both an ancient tomb and a Rubik’s cube, and you realize that this too is a work by Sean Scully.
It is a confirmation of all that you’ve seen inside. The blocks are reminiscent of a Mayan pyramid, but they don’t quite align, there’s an energy to them, a sense of movement, as if they were stacked in haste, like a quick sketch in stone. The soft shading and shifting shadows on the rough-hewn blocks echo the subtle change in tone in his watercolors where pigment has settled into the undulations of the paper.
The section of alternating slabs of light and dark at the top of the sculpture perfectly echo the patterns in his watercolors as if light was filtering in between the bars on a window. Even the long dark shadow cast on the patterns of bricks on the courtyard floor seem to provide a glimpse of how Scully sees the world. And the stone framed windows that pierce the shifting light on the enormous wall behind the sculpture - those promises, that keep the wall from becoming relentless - make you contemplate all that you’ve just witnessed in the galleries beyond.
The exhibit at Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara runs through September 29, 2019.