Sean Scully: Blue Review by art critic Patrick Javault

By Patrick Javault

Translated

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Sean Scully: Blue

Sean Scully has always maintained that abstraction is a reality for him and that all his paintings are based on the way people assemble things in the world. The nine paintings that make up the 'Blue' exhibition are all the same square format, painted on copper, and grouped in threes on three of the walls of the main room. For Scully, celebrating blue means evoking the blue in his life or all that his life owes to this color. Before entering the room, one can read a text by the artist in which he mentions a mother who sometimes performed on stage and whose success was her rendition of 'Unchained Melody,' in which there is no mention of blue but of 'rivers flowing to the sea'; and for him, this amounts to the same thing. The book accompanying the exhibition includes a poem by Kelly Grovier in which the following line is repeated: 'The Sky is empty but the stars bleed through – cerulean, cobalt, Prussian blue.' These blues are prominent in the paintings of the series, and alongside them appear squares or rectangles of green, plum, and black, the layering of colors sometimes being noticeable. Whether it is also present in the composition of the associated colors, or whether black enhances its brilliance, blue is clearly the subject and the dominant color.

Through the interplay of squares and rectangles, the subtle variations in their number, the freedom and diversity of the brushstrokes, and the luminosity, the series reveals itself as powerfully musical. It is the painter we know, but addressing us in a different tone, in a different register of emotion.

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