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Sean Scully Red Durango, 1991 oil on linen 100 x 130 in. "You see, for me, a natural motif and a philosophical motif are the same thing, there's no difference. Because my work is based on structures that I believe express human nature. My work is deeply urban and it's very much about human nature. It's about trying to penetrate into those fundamental structures that we use. For me, it is a natural motif, it's what I see. But I don't just see it as a visual motif. I see it as communication, as an expression of human nature, and I see it as a kind of unconscious and conscious intentionality, everywhere I look."1 Sean Scully, 1995 Over the course of his career, Sean Scully has developed a vocabulary for the stripe that expresses a wide range of emotions and ideas. Within a seemingly narrow iconography, the artist has produced brilliantly nuanced effects by experimenting with the dimension, color and composition of the stripe in its vertical, horizontal and diagonal orientations. By constructing his paintings on a heroic scale in multi-paneled arrangements, he injects a sculptural quality that heightens the work's texture and design. Scully is not alone in his pursuit of defining and refining the art of the stripe. He joins a group of artists who both influenced and reinforced his direction over the years, including: Piet Mondrian, Francois Morellet, Jesus-Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Gene Davis, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt and Barnet Newman whose writings nourished the intellectual side of Scully's personality. Each of Scully's paintings are unique, although relationships between works are harmoniously consistent, underlining the artist's discipline and commitment to exploring the sensual and transcendental evocations possible in oil. As an art student in the late 1960s, he became acquainted with the paintings of Mark Rothko whose spirit can be sensed in such works as Red Durango. Multiple layers of oil paint, soft, irregular edges and rich colors that emanate light define this important work whose title refers to the Mexican city and state, an area rich in minerals and ferrous metals. The luminosity of the Mexican landscape was first captured in a watercolor dating from 1984 titled, Wall of Light, a theme to which he has recently returned.2 Part of the beauty of Red Durango emerges from the artist's masterful synthesis of balance and movement arising from different widths of horizontal and vertical stripes in multiple fields. This painting tangentially relates to a work dating from 1990 in the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf with the title Durango, although Scully does not consider them a series. From the beginning of his career, Scully's work has reflected his travels and experiences of landscape and architectural spaces. During a trip to Morocco in 1969, the artist was captivated by the display of strips of multi-colored dyed wool, used for carpets, that hung in the market as well as the canvas tents stitched from bright fabrics illuminated by the desert sun.3 Attention to such details has led Scully's eye to the pieced-together, brightly painted shacks found in Mexico and the Dominican Republic that he has captured in a series of highly saturated color photographs. The Patton collection contains a suite of twelve C-prints dating from 2000 and titled Santo Domingo for Nene. In these photographs, Scully focuses on the doors and surrounding horizontal wood clapboards of dwellings that parallel the compositions of his paintings to a remarkable degree. Transcending their formal aspects, they also suggest the poignancy and resilience of the human spirit, a quality that characterizes much of the artist's work. Barbara Matilsky |