Sean Scully exhibits his latest series of paintings Review by Béatrice de Rochebouët

By Béatrice de Rochebouët

Present in all major collections, the American artist is exhibiting at Thaddaeus Ropac, in the Marais district of Paris.

His powerful, generous, and luminous painting allows emotions to burst forth through chromatic nuances and contrasts strikingly with the cerebral, taciturn, and somewhat unapproachable man himself. Yet, behind the nine Wall of Light canvases on copper backgrounds from Sean Scully 's new Blue series, offered at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery for between 500,000 and 700,000 euros, one is eager to learn more. Especially since the Austrian-born Parisian gallerist rarely makes a mistake when he brings an artist into his stable.

These nine canvases form a vibrant homage to the places that blue evokes for the Irish-born American artist, born in Dublin in 1945 to a singer mother and a tango champion father. Life wasn't easy for the family when they moved to a poor neighborhood in South London. Nor was it easy for Sean Scully when he lost his 19-year-old son, Paul, in a car accident in the early 1980s. The blue that drew him to art was the color of the bicycle from his early years at nursery school, which inspired him to begin his first series of Blue canvases in his Kentish Town studio in Hampstead.

His obsession with his palette

'When I paint ,' Scully explains, 'that’s when all my turmoil manifests itself. It’s not a way of showing, it’s a way of confronting things. (…) If I create a canvas with vibrant colors, I’m very proud of myself, because I’ve overcome my sorrow.' His poems, or those of his friends, recited in the middle of the exhibition, alone on his small chair, evoke his memories of listening to his mother sing 'Unchained Melody,' 'a sad song,' he says. 'Detailing the passage of time and love, flowing like rivers to finally lead us to that blue sea. (…) In her fragile voice, she brought tears to the eyes of that post-war audience. (…) Hands clasped and the room turned blue.'

This blue, 'the color of angels,' according to Scully, was the obsession of his palette, drawn from the melancholy of Picasso's Blue Period or from the light of Matisse's Mediterranean and Moroccan landscapes. His vocabulary of broad bands of color, 'a rather figurative abstraction, because it's not distant,' he explains, earned him international recognition. This began with France, which unveiled his work at his first retrospective at the Jeu de Paume (1996) and brought his paintings, a blend of the Op Art of the English artist Bridget Riley, the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism by Mark Rothko, and Minimalism through its chromatic austerity, into the collections of the Centre Pompidou . Not forgetting the color born from his stays in Mexico, under the influence of Josef Albers. Since 2024, blue has reigned supreme, 'cerulean, cobalt, and Prussian blue,' as critic Kelly Grovier writes.