Sean Scully's exhibition in Paris Reviewed in Artlyst's July 'Art Diary'

By Rev Jonathan Evens

[...] Sean Scully creates expressive, multi-layered abstract paintings which fuse the colouristic traditions of European painting with the scale and expressiveness of American abstraction. Through arrangements of coloured bars and horizontal beams, some with inset or relief elements, his paintings spurn the cold rigour of Minimalism in favour of an impassioned application of colour that infuses his work with an intrinsic vitality. Though abstract, his paintings are rooted in the real world, referencing elements of the manual labour he was involved in since leaving school at the age of 15 – typesetting, stacking and construction work – as well as the landscapes he has encountered in his numerous travels. His concern for the environment and his focus on nature is reflected throughout his work.

His exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Pantin space in Paris has works which combine different aspects of key series that have characterised his work and career. In these images, Scully draws on his early work with interlocking lines and contrasting colours to form an intricate textural tartan into which he insets squares of more densely arranged rectangular shapes characteristic of his ongoing ‘Wall of Light’ and ‘Landline’ series. Begun in 2013, Scully’s ‘Landline’ series marked a shift in the artist’s practice, evoking horizons and landscapes rather than the architectural, brick-like structures that had thus far inspired his ‘Wall of Light’ compositions. Works such as ‘California Deep’ combine both geometries, embedding one painting within another to establish a dialogue between image and frame, inside and outside, the natural and the manmade. The new large-scale ‘Landline’ works have an earthy palette of moss and ochre that illustrates his new approach to colour, a reduction in the brightness of colour to focus on the materiality of colour. [...]

‘Sean Scully: Landline Weave’, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 3 June—29 July 2023