Customer Reviews

Sean Scully: Wall of Light

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Scully is a colorist without peer, who renews one's faith that great colorists still survive into the 21st century. The book is a handsome and fulsome tribute to this brilliant painter, with numerous fine color reproductions. The text is well-written and very informative.

I just saw the very fine show of Sean Scully's works on paper at the Luther Brady Gallery at the George Washington University in DC. The works on paper, especially the watercolors, have, unsurprisingly, a slightly more intimate character than his famous huge paintings. And this intimate character clued me in today how to see works like the ones that appear in this book, The Wall of Light series. I had seen this catalogue before, and looked at it again at the Brady gallery today. So, I came away with an insight I had never had before about the artist, and wouldn't you know, I found it utterly confirmed as well in the little pamphlet catalogue they produced for the GWU exhibition. The essay by Phillips refers to Scully's "romantic reaction to minimalism". But this "romantic" sense refers not, I think, to the usual historiographic sense of "romanticism" in the humanities. Rather it really means romantic as in a painting as a big mash- note of sorts. Or love letter. But really the mash- note, speaking of infatuation, is a bit more precise of how his paintings work aesthetically. He has taken the de-personalised aesthetic of Minimalism and allowed himself, with the detachment of an analyst, to describe through painting the intrinsic flip-side of of de-personalization. The watercolors truly reveal this, and the larger works on paper drive the point home with a fervent punch of sorts, as they caress and seduce you with fragrant substratums and bedroom eyes made of bands of color like a gaze almost blankly staring intently at you and clearly, unabashedly saying "come hither". It really is neat trick ultimately, and is very impressive. But it is also a comment on our age strangely. I think I see now that the real genius of this artist is that he takes what is a somewhat emotionally pornographic impulse, and by being very studied and careful about it all, keeps it from ever veering into that tawdry realm. But it is somehow there as a dark potential, hovering in the luscious colors as background. It is quite the experience, if you are not given to prudishness. And I think I see now why the Works on Paper have not been shown as much, precisely because it makes this odd quality evident. I don't have a problem with it; it is a brilliant comment on our time, using great art to do it. Therefore as I looked at the Wall of Light catalogue, it was clear that all the reproductions in it were able to convey something of this amazing and seductive color character of the works, and that is quite an accomplishment.

Scully's grid patterns give him a flexible organizational tool to create an infinate range of color exploration.
He is an incredible colorist, rich, handsome and painterly. A body of work that rivals Rothko.

Mike kelly