The inaugural exhibition of Scully at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris showcases recently executed abstract works that remain in arresting formalist and conceptual dialogues with painting’s ontology. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris. Sean Scully: Between Heaven and Earth, installation view. Touches of color through bouncing brushstrokes suspend the distinctions of opacity and translucence, for Scully’s handling of oil has transformed the linen surface into a sensorial palette of lavish chromatic crescendos of heightened painterliness.
This somewhat modestly scaled oil-on-linen painting, measuring about 24 by 32 inches, absorbs the viewer through the fleshiness of its painterly surface, where the whiskers of the brush at once organize the fundamentally geometric composition and transubstantiate the ideality of linear forms into pulsating shimmers of light. Jet black, scarlet, vivid crimson, rusty red, carmine, imperial red and shades of Spanish grey intermixed with orange hues: these might be a few of the chromatic designations of the rectangular blocks that evoke masonry in the ravishing painting titled Wall Orange Black of Sean Scully, executed in 2020.
When art is dressed in the most threadbare cloth, we recognize it most clearly as art.
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