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Lot Essay
"Seeing the Mexican ruins, the stacking of the stones, and the way the light hit those façades, had something to do with it, maybe everything to do with it." Sean Scully
Painted in 2006, Sean Scully’s Living Land is a composition enriched by deep, earthen hues. Panels of buttery taupe and desert beige are stacked between dark peat-browns, soft ash and rough charcoal grey. Sparks of turquois, Saville orange, and blush pink shimmer in the gaps between these neutral moments that, in tandem with the energetic brushstrokes, create a gently simmering vibrancy. For each rectangular segment, the artist’s brush moves along its longest edge. Pieced together in various directions, the movement of his hand constantly changes such that the eye is drawn into an endless current around the composition. For how short these tiles can be, the artist’s hand does not feel rushed or stifled. Rather, the energy from one piece flows into the next, even as its course changes. The title then becomes especially apt, as this ambulatory quality creates a sense the canvas is almost breathing, the dry edges of paint around each panel like a quivering exhale and the smooth drag of the brush like a sustained sigh.
The work derives from Scully’s notable, decades long, ‘Wall of Light’ series. The mosaiced motif of these abstract paintings was born in the light of the Mayan ruins of the Yucatán in 1983. Captivated by the way the light danced against these ancient structures, Scully let go of his earlier multi-canvas constructions and visual hierarchies in favor of a more unified composition. In the earliest phase of this series the artist privileged brighter, chromatic palettes closer in tone to their compositional predecessors. In 1998, however, he took a turn toward the organic. With a distance of fifteen years, Scully looked back on this momentous trip and sought to conjure the emotional memory of the ruins and the transfigurative property of the light. The aura of that place seemed to transport the artist to a time and space he’d never been, but could feel the very essence of. “Seeing the Mexican ruins, the stacking of the stones, and the way the light hit those façades, had something to do with it, maybe everything to do with it,” he explained (S. Scully, quoted in Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington D. C., 2005, p. 24).
Just as the ruins could project Scully into a past not his own, his walls of light are bids to recapture a moment of wonder and allow the viewer to be transported to his past, as if it were their own. In this effort, Scully’s artistic practice underwent a fundamental shift. Not only did the colors of his works change in tone, but the long stripes that had previously characterized them surrendered to loose blocks of color interlocked in arbitrary patterns, as exemplified by Living Land. As Danilo Eccher notes, “The result was a geometry that was less precise, less self-confident, less presumptuous, becoming instead more poetic, more mysterious, more intimate and more truthful” (D. Eccher, “Sean Scully” in Sean Scully: A Retrospective, London, 2007, p. 13). The subtler tones of nature are visually less insistent, yet they retain a dynamic presence. Like the ruins of their inception, they recall at once an architectural monumentality and a delicate frailty—something eternal and yet also destructible. ‘When light and wall meet, strength and fragility can become symbiotic, as well as symbolic,’ Michael Auping wrote of the series. ‘It is this unique effect that Scully increasingly has come to investigate in his paintings … one brushstroke at a time’ (M. Auping, ‘No Longer a Wall’ in S. Bennett Phillips, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, New York 2005, p. 23).
Living Land perfectly encapsulates the mystique and transcendental properties of the ‘Wall of Light’ series. Fundamentally, a wall of light is a paradoxical image. Light is ephemeral, translucent, and enveloping. A wall is rigid, imposing, and unyielding. To merge the two in one’s mind is to create something defiant in its dialectics. When a viewer approaches Living Land, they first confront what appears as a dense expanse of dark color and shape. As they continue to look, the opacity reveals itself a mirage, and the layers of paint give way to one another. Brooding grey and brown tones concede to rinds of sparkling fluorescents. As the painting unfurls, what was once understood as solid yields into mutability. The glow becomes not that of the sun beating down on a passive wall, but a light coming from within. The darkness of the surface pushes against the glow seeping out of its seems, and the tidal nature of these two forces once again reminds of the current taking the eye around the composition, the swirl of energy that moves around the flat surface now pulsing into the third dimension, underscoring that, yes, this land is certainly alive.
Painted in 2006, Sean Scully’s Living Land is a composition enriched by deep, earthen hues. Panels of buttery taupe and desert beige are stacked between dark peat-browns, soft ash and rough charcoal grey. Sparks of turquois, Saville orange, and blush pink shimmer in the gaps between these neutral moments that, in tandem with the energetic brushstrokes, create a gently simmering vibrancy. For each rectangular segment, the artist’s brush moves along its longest edge. Pieced together in various directions, the movement of his hand constantly changes such that the eye is drawn into an endless current around the composition. For how short these tiles can be, the artist’s hand does not feel rushed or stifled. Rather, the energy from one piece flows into the next, even as its course changes. The title then becomes especially apt, as this ambulatory quality creates a sense the canvas is almost breathing, the dry edges of paint around each panel like a quivering exhale and the smooth drag of the brush like a sustained sigh.
The work derives from Scully’s notable, decades long, ‘Wall of Light’ series. The mosaiced motif of these abstract paintings was born in the light of the Mayan ruins of the Yucatán in 1983. Captivated by the way the light danced against these ancient structures, Scully let go of his earlier multi-canvas constructions and visual hierarchies in favor of a more unified composition. In the earliest phase of this series the artist privileged brighter, chromatic palettes closer in tone to their compositional predecessors. In 1998, however, he took a turn toward the organic. With a distance of fifteen years, Scully looked back on this momentous trip and sought to conjure the emotional memory of the ruins and the transfigurative property of the light. The aura of that place seemed to transport the artist to a time and space he’d never been, but could feel the very essence of. “Seeing the Mexican ruins, the stacking of the stones, and the way the light hit those façades, had something to do with it, maybe everything to do with it,” he explained (S. Scully, quoted in Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington D. C., 2005, p. 24).
Just as the ruins could project Scully into a past not his own, his walls of light are bids to recapture a moment of wonder and allow the viewer to be transported to his past, as if it were their own. In this effort, Scully’s artistic practice underwent a fundamental shift. Not only did the colors of his works change in tone, but the long stripes that had previously characterized them surrendered to loose blocks of color interlocked in arbitrary patterns, as exemplified by Living Land. As Danilo Eccher notes, “The result was a geometry that was less precise, less self-confident, less presumptuous, becoming instead more poetic, more mysterious, more intimate and more truthful” (D. Eccher, “Sean Scully” in Sean Scully: A Retrospective, London, 2007, p. 13). The subtler tones of nature are visually less insistent, yet they retain a dynamic presence. Like the ruins of their inception, they recall at once an architectural monumentality and a delicate frailty—something eternal and yet also destructible. ‘When light and wall meet, strength and fragility can become symbiotic, as well as symbolic,’ Michael Auping wrote of the series. ‘It is this unique effect that Scully increasingly has come to investigate in his paintings … one brushstroke at a time’ (M. Auping, ‘No Longer a Wall’ in S. Bennett Phillips, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, New York 2005, p. 23).
Living Land perfectly encapsulates the mystique and transcendental properties of the ‘Wall of Light’ series. Fundamentally, a wall of light is a paradoxical image. Light is ephemeral, translucent, and enveloping. A wall is rigid, imposing, and unyielding. To merge the two in one’s mind is to create something defiant in its dialectics. When a viewer approaches Living Land, they first confront what appears as a dense expanse of dark color and shape. As they continue to look, the opacity reveals itself a mirage, and the layers of paint give way to one another. Brooding grey and brown tones concede to rinds of sparkling fluorescents. As the painting unfurls, what was once understood as solid yields into mutability. The glow becomes not that of the sun beating down on a passive wall, but a light coming from within. The darkness of the surface pushes against the glow seeping out of its seems, and the tidal nature of these two forces once again reminds of the current taking the eye around the composition, the swirl of energy that moves around the flat surface now pulsing into the third dimension, underscoring that, yes, this land is certainly alive.