‘I can live with not finding a solution’ Sean Scully in conversation
On the day of the opening of his exhibition To Feel at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Salzburg, Sean Scully made time for an interview. The Irish artist is in good spirits and quick-witted. Taking his new works from the ‘Wall of Light’ series as a starting point, he talks about formative influences from his childhood, about loss and memory, about the emotional power of abstract painting, about his love for Europe – and about the realisation that some questions may remain unanswered for him.
Frank Lassak: We’re looking at your painting La Grande Mer, which took you three years to complete. How much of the original version is still visible today, Sean?
Sean Scully: Originally, the painting was more colourful. Only the green bar remains from the first version. And that green bar defines the work. So, in a way, *La Grande Mer* is about loss – the loss of the past.
Lassak: Is this sense of loss visible only in this work, or is it a feature that runs through all the paintings you’re exhibiting here?
Scully: All the works engage with their own archaeology, their own narrative, their own sense of loss. When I cover something up, I make it inaccessible. And hopefully, in doing so, I create a sense of longing.
Lassak: In the exhibition catalogue, the works are described as a particular form of self-portrait, and at times even as seismographs of your state of mind. How does this inner state find its way into an abstract work?
Scully: A painting – especially one of these – is an emotional arena. For a long time, I painted constructive images in which emotion collided with reality. The new paintings break away from that. They move away from the shock of reality and towards pure pictoriality. A bit old-fashioned, one might say.
Lassak: What makes them pictorial?
Scully: They’re figurative because a story unfolds between the background and the foreground. If you simply put coloured bars together, you end up with a pattern that can be interesting. The possibilities are endless, just like with Lego. You can place this here, change that, and keep going like that. But that’s pure improvisation – without any emotional weight.
