The Geometry of Woe | Scully and Words

Since according to common agreement there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes, the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all the states and affections of sensible things. Hence no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter. Imagination is different from assertion and denial; for what is true or false involves a synthesis of concepts. In what will the primary concepts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these nor even our other concepts are images, though they necessarily involve them?2

If in his sensuous, often lyrical and at the same time incredibly precise texts the artist did not offer the power of words for the interpretation of his images, I too would probably not resort to converting the powerful visual evidence recorded on canvas or metal sheets into verbal loose change. Sean Scully’s self-interpretation, however, is so rich and convincing that I am unable to escape the compulsion to adapt: as he himself identifies his sources and idols – being a relationist – from Mondrian to Beckett, from Van Gogh to Bob Dylan, a flood of parallels and allusions unfolds to explore for their connections.

Above all, the will, the strong light of the arc that creates the work, that precedes and triggers the intention, the will that ultimately holds the work together during its completion, and even more so afterwards. Well, it is primarily this that one must observe more closely (with or without being blindfolded).

You talk about something and then you say, have you got any questions? Shall we analyze it, pull it to pieces, make it understandable for you? And of course what he’s saying is that you can’t make it understandable. This painting is about the left side and the right side, and the irreconcilable relationship between the two. And it’s about not providing any answers. I thought of the left side of the painting as a figure. … And I thought of the right side of the painting as perhaps a painting that had fallen apart and been put back together without a plan, without the original format being available. So one was about perfection, one side is about perfection, and one side is about fracture or the possibility of something being lost, an order being lost. And then I slapped them together to make a relationship. And that’s the kind of relationship that exists in the world. So I’ve tried to make the relationship exist in this painting in a more intensified, a more condensed way. – Scully writes about the work Any Questions,3 and the artist’s interpretation prompts me to take a leap of faith: in light of the treatment in Scully’s Mondrianesque paintings,4 it is perhaps not sacrilegious to paraphrase the train of thought in Géza Ottlik’s theory of the novel. On the one hand, because the painter himself “dramatizes”, adds sujet to his works, and on the other hand, his tastes and literary references are very similar to Ottlik’s; Beckett, Joyce, and Irish literature and culture in general are extremely important to both of them. On the other hand – of course – because of the element of chance. Scully often invokes the unexpected contingency as a source of inspiration. His technique is also based on this in part, as the seemingly austere grids themselves, and the fields they occupy even more so, are all painted in a richly layered, loose, pastose manner, resulting in almost expressionist planes that recall the surfaces of Pierre Soulages or Robert Ryman, whom Scully acknowledged as a model, and of Mark Rothko, to whom Scully often refers.

And finally, one more reason: as Dávid Fehér, the editor and best author of the impressive exhibition catalogue, who has done a brilliant job curating this magnificent exhibition, writes: Scully “seeks the paradoxical harmony between incompatible qualities.”5 (which I think he has found and has captured in his work), so that we can even layer – not our point of view, but our viewing planes, like a palimpsest.

The world in front of the grid. The world inside the grid.

Shifting dimensions and layers: the above paragraphs, a rewriting of Ottlik’s text, if not closely, but in method and content, mimics or at least imitates the process by which Scully seeks and finds inspiration and ‘themes’ in his threefold (real) approach to reality, from landscape, the elements of space or from his own photographs7 and their motifs to his paintings. And back again, in a new layer or dimension: he often captures the sensory-material reality of richly painted surfaces in close-ups of his own works, and by enlarging the ‘skin’ of the paintings, transforming their colours and shapes, as if they were readymade factures, into a re-formed abstract configuration.

These works, as far as I can see and understand them, also follow a kind of musical method: it seems to me that they (also) use homophony.8 Homophony is the musical texture in which all the notes move more or less simultaneously, i.e., they live in the same rhythm. The textures of the colour-filled bands and rectangles give the impression of a sequence of chords, i.e. they are valid as a vertical musical structure, while the facture and texture of the surfaces can also be described by polyphony, in which the horizontal musical structure formed by the movement of the notes dominates, and they are independent of each other. The homophonic texture may be represented by a series of vertical blocks that symbolise the chords that occur over time, but their composition may vary logically. Scully’s paintings are tonal and real sequences and are perhaps closest to Steve Reich’s repetitive compositional technique.

In Scully’s paintings, the equal-sized bands – the broad and sometimes full-bodied, other times loosely translucent brushstrokes seem to obey the ornamentation of some kind of staircase, a step-by-step process – but they do not outline any quasi-narrative. The planes, which are often painted over, bury images underneath them, like a palimpsest, and even if, from a distance, they seem to erase gesture, expressiveness, and, wittingly or unwittingly, refer back to the puritanism, hermeticism and spiritualism of classical geometric abstraction of the first half of the 20th century, by modifying the viewpoint of the observer – the distance – they only reveal the incredibly impulsive richness of the details. The two planes of movement in Scully’s paintings are connected by colour and, as it were, are channelled in the same direction. The striped, rectangular ‘compartments’, however, generally do not capitalize the direct meaning suggested by colour: in his best paintings, the mixed – broken, muted, woeful – colours or the damp, soft greys and blacks, averaging emotions even when contrasted, are primarily intended to define the objecthood of the fact of painting (without, of course, denying the possibility of association and the discovery of material origins) and to separate it from its environment, from the world-which-is-not-painting. Nonetheless, Scully’s ‘colour theory’ in these paintings is deeply indebted to that of his beloved Van Gogh: hence, perhaps, the paintings’ elusive aura of sorrow, which pervades and overrides their rigorous construction.