Sean Scully Goes Down a Rabbit Hole John Yau reviews Sean Scully's new publication

As parents know, a child’s favorite story often gets told again and again, the narrator making little changes to keep the young listener alert. That dance of repetition and variation within a rhythmically incremental narrative is one of the foundational structures of children’s stories. Artist Sean Scully quickly figured this out when, in 2014, he began telling his five-year-old son, Oisin, an improvised story. Played out over months, that bedtime ritual became increasingly elaborate. This serves as the background to the exhibition Sean Scully: Jack the Wolf at Cheim & Read. Jack the Wolf lives near a town famed for its chocolate. One day he meets Rebecca Rabbit. Out of that Scully and his son spin a captivating tale.

Along with the 42 works for the children’s book Jack the Wolf (Callaway Books, 2023), the exhibition includes three paintings on different surfaces (linen, copper, and aluminum) and one sculpture, “Felt Stack 1” (2020), made of felt and colored aluminum slabs. But for me the heart of the show was the set of drawings done by Scully and Oisin in watercolor, ink, marker, and pencil, dated between 2014 and ’23. At a certain point, it did not matter who did what, which added to their charm. Not having read the story until after I saw the show, I was also struck by the good-natured and quirky humor. Jack stretches on his couch and reads a newspaper called Howl while Rebecca peruses the pages of Hop. On the wall above Jack’s couch are portraits of his mom and dad. It is details like these that keep the story lively and, in places, unexpected. It is evident from the story that Scully took the challenge of making it new quite seriously, which I suspected even before I read it.