SOVER SCENE: The primal grace of painter Sean Scully

2/07/08

by Anne Lawrence Guyon

Brutal. Emphatic. Melancholy. Argumentative.

These are a few of the terms with which Irish painter Sean Scully recently described his massive, layered abstractions during a talk at Dartmouth a few days after an expansive exhibition of his work opened at the Hood Museum.

Unlike many artists who prefer to let the work speak for itself or for whom the very notion of attempting to articulate its meaning with language is antithetical to the process, Scully sinks his intellectual teeth into discussion of his art with the same might and hunger that he puts into the making of it.

Addressing a house so packed with disciples that the college had to set up a live feed in an off-site hall across the green, Scully candidly and fervently elucidated a comprehensive overview of his work, starting with the sharp-edged, geometrically patterned early canvasses from the 1970s and bringing us to his more brooding panels of the present.

The show, which runs through March 9, fills the entire top floor of the Hood with 23 paintings ranging from book-size to mammoth, as well as a room containing a few of Scully’s photographs and a documentary video of the artist in his element.

“The Art of the Stripe” was organized by the Hood Museum with no subsequent venues slated and is a rare convergence of some of Scully’s strongest works, sagely curated and presented in a flow that fluently conveys the evolution of his personal, poetic and plastic sensibilities.

Fittingly, the first piece our eyes find at the top of the stairs is a pivotal work from 1987 called “Precious,” one of the last paintings Scully made containing stripes extending from one edge of the canvas to the other before he began working primarily with the finite bands of color that have come to be emblematic of his distinct aesthetic.

Contained in a 72-inch square are six wide horizontal stripes, alternating red and white, with the center of the canvas inset by a smaller painting of thin horizontal and vertical strips of black and white. At first glance a straightforward exploration of pigmentation, depth of field and line — with the inner image optically receding and hues dimmed as if by age — the inexorable force of the painting emerges slowly, its outer border becoming a swath of a mammoth flag while patterns within suggest prison garb and a jail-cell window.

Here Scully’s stripes sound an initial alarm, as if warning us to stay back, yet as we approach and see that the white is not an institutional clean, but a shifting patchwork of pale grays and creams, there is a fragility that inevitably pulls us in. That it was inspired by fearful childhood memories of sailing across the Irish Sea during his family’s move from Dublin to England is evidence that Scully’s layering has profoundly emotional dimensions as well.

The captain pacing back and forth across the deck, the post-WWII mines which randomly obliterated boats on a regular basis and the unnervingly opaque fog that Scully described are all contained in this ostensibly reductive piece. “Precious” is about familiarity, family and survival and exemplifies the depth in all of his work.

While discussing the period when he made this painting’s predecessor — a far more restrained yet equally potent version, rendered in a vivid, sour palette six years prior — he was characteristically veracious.

“In the early ’80s, I started to make paintings compositional and sculptural because I felt that painting had argued itself out,” he insisted. “It was a question of what to do after the perfection, the elegance and the austerity of minimalism reached its zenith.”

The earliest pieces in the show reveal the beginnings of this inner dialogue that had Scully fully immersed in the possibilities of the stripe as a versatile visual device before he shed the limiting vestiges of the period and pushed forward to a more vociferous means of limning and coloration.

Just as Rothko’s field paintings take on greater depth of meaning when we explore his early surrealist interpretations of mythology and Hans Hofmann’s later abstractions become yet more vibrant in light of his interior still lifes, Scully’s more recent works are duly illuminated by the empirical soil from which they grew.

It was during a 1969 trip to Morocco when bold strips of color used for rugs and tents harnessed Scully’s verdant curiosity, infusing his entire direction with a methodology he deems “if not radical, somewhat ornery.”

The stripe, it turns out, is one historically loaded term — rooted in the German “die Strieme” or “mark on the body” — going back as far as biblical references to the lash and enduring numerous periods of patently nefarious connotations since.

In his 2001 book, “The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric,” Michel Pastoureau asserts that the stripe came to signify membership in “certain categories of reprobates or outcasts,” including jesters, whores, derelicts, dissenters and those already ostracized by society for perceived satanic associations based on appearance, nationality or legal status.

Thirteenth-century Paris looked so suspiciously upon Palestinian Carmelites who came into town wearing brown-and-white striped habits that the uproar resulted in Pope Boniface VIII banning stripes theretofore in all religious attire. Even animals were not exempt from pejorative connotations, with tigers as suspect as traitors.

While it is a compelling notion to think that Scully’s stripes are roiling with the same dastardly implications that labeled miscreants and villains, his own explication of motivations and meaning shed a far less sensational — yet extraordinarily brilliant — light upon what has been more than four decades of building luminous and lugubrious patterns with oblong segments of color.

More psychology than stigma, Scully’s gravitation toward the stripe reflects an inner struggle, a relentless battle between forces with which we are all familiar, but that he continually excavates, examines, weighs and questions in the context of heavily worked, pigment-laden paintings.

“I paint in a way that is somewhat insecure,” he attested at Dartmouth. “Color can include a sense of doubt and my earlier paintings can be saturated with it, overloaded, where there’s a reference to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.”

This raw candor infuses his work with a poignant nakedness that often hides beneath the bravado of monumental scale, insistent borders and vociferous, earthy hues. From afar, the heroism of Scully’s largest pieces fills the room with a visual swagger constructed of bulky, deep-toned blocks crammed tightly into epic expanses that assume the omnipresence of urban congestion, towering stone walls or brawny river embankments.

“Dakar,” from 1989, is one of many such canvases that Scully assembled by screwing thick, linen-wrapped stretchers together into Herculean puzzles, each section an oversized, aggressively painted tablet in and of itself. The last of its kind before his return to traditional single-stretcher paintings, it is a prime example of the complex fusion of pictorial vigor, experiential reference and emotive weight that inhabits Scully’s entire oeuvre.

“It refers to John Coltrane’s album called ‘Dakar,’” he explained. “There is a lot of sensuality in my work that I attach to elemental drawing. They’re glum and there can be a sense of menace. I believe in the idea of a universal language and I’m quite sure I’ll never give that up.”

The balance Scully strikes between this salty ferocity of spirit, tacit vulnerability and multi-layered denotation is a product of the spatial tension he creates through crucial choices of palette, gesture and composition. Throughout the exhibit, we are drawn toward each painting by a cool, ubiquitous magnetism, but at close proximity, an abiding tenderness and reverence becomes palpable, if not intoxicating.

In “Holly,” a 2004 series of 15 paintings hung in chapel-formation, one large altar-piece stationed at the end of the room reveals, upon close inspection, overtly gentle variations in brushwork, with thin veils of bright hues shifting and glowing like embers beneath muted, ragged-edged slabs.

With symphonic, dynamic rhythm, “The Art of the Stripe” is a potent, eloquent presentation of Scully’s remarkable ability to make paintings that are at once ominous and tranquil, blunt and meditative, initially harsh and ultimately seductive. Even his most hulking fortifications evoke an enigmatic inscrutability no less fraught with uncertainty and hope than we simple viewers.

Scully, of course, twigs it. “There is nothing to solve, just arenas of experience. Energetic, life-affirming, red-hearted paintings covered in melancholia, like their author.”

Online: www.hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu

Annie: annieguyoncommunications.com

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