Sean Scully: Mirroring review How can a rectangle contain so much suffering?
By Jonathan Jones
A square painting called Blue Wall hangs in the gallery, its surface streaked with intercrossing rectangles in different shades of blue, richly brushed, thick and riverine. But there are gaps showing warm woody red beneath calming waters. It’s an abstract painting, a minimalist one even, yet there’s a rawness suggesting heartfelt narratives, barely contained feelings, kept just about in check behind the blue facade.
In this little essayistic exhibition, Blue Wall’s creator, the abstract artist Sean Scully, lets you into his life with unguarded passion. At the other end of the room, he exposes what his abstract art sublimates and transfigures in a recent self-portrait. It’s an innocent, honest attempt to look in the mirror and see himself, sitting at home in front of one of his big striped canvases, the colours of his clothes bouncing against it. Scully seems to be in a state of artistic flux and a mood of self-scrutiny, not just “mirroring” himself, as the exhibition title has it, in that self-portrait, but imagining a counterlife in which an artist famous for a very recognisable style of abstract painting is a drawer of cups and a portraitist of family life.
His model for this foray into small pictures of the big thing we call everyday life is the Italian still life artist Giorgio Morandi. A wall of prints and drawings by Morandi faces a wall of Scully works in a room the size of a large bedroom. You can see why he loves Morandi and identifies with him: the Italian painted with precision and restraint, repeating slight variants on arrangements of bottles and cups at his quiet home in Bologna from the 1920s to the 1960s. Works here include one in which Morandi dares to draw a bunch of broccoli.
There is no getting to the bottom of them. And in the same way, if you find the regular fields of rectangular colour Scully has been painting for more than four decades tranquil, you haven’t been looking closely enough. They flow with sensitivity, blaze with memory. Whether you see them as ploughed Irish fields (he was born in Dublin) or metropolitan structures (he grew up in London), his lines, his trenches or planks of colour, are hard won, dug up. Here he lets you see where he digs, in sketches full of fierce, free emotion.
