From the earliest work in the exhibition, a Gouache on paper from 1968, described by the writer Kelly Grovier as ‘an abacus of thirty shuddering circles squeezed within as many squares' to his more recent 'Dark Window' series where dense black squares are squeezed within his landlines, (made during lockdown and unveiled in the New York Times in April 2020) Scully has returned time and time again to test, tease and push against geometry. 

Scully’s recurrent concentration on the square is grounded, partly, in historical awareness. Squares of many kinds — small components or organising frameworks, zones of darkness and painterly density, areas of organised colour and expressively nuanced illumination — are presented in styles sensitive to the manifold experiments with fundamental geometric form that defined earlier generations of art. Yet the square is also, for Scully, a figure of empirical, worldly, in-the-moment value: a shape that speaks, not only, of the perfections and complications of two-dimensional abstract form, but also of actual conditions of seeing and being in the world. The varied specificity of Scully’s squares — as with other recognizable configurations of rectangular layering and patterning in his art — often emerges from considered responses to places, atmospheres and experiences.

Geometry, again and again, is brought into correspondence with geography. As such, squares can be key compositional features and, at the same time, diversely implied ‘windows’. Squares are structures for seeing that might, from painting to painting, from drawing to drawing, offer generous variations of worldly light or — depending on the agitations of the times — propose more obscured, darkened and troubled views. Scully's square-centred artworks have a grounding but ambiguous presence comparable to what Seamus Heaney once called the "there-you-are and where-are-you of poetry." 

Declan Long
Course Director: MA Art in the Contemporary World
National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Sean Scully
b.1945, Dublin, Ireland.

 

Scully’s art is thoroughly international in perspective, drawing on the diverse historical and cultural influences of places that, at different times, have been profoundly important to him. He has taken inspiration from many cherished, varied elements of European culture (ranging from the harmonic ideals of ancient Greek architecture to the vernacular design of stone walls in rural Ireland) but he has also successfully responded to – and built on – the legacy of abstract painting. Scully’s commanding, internationally recognizable oeuvre – based on repeating and steadily adapting arrangements of discretely nuanced blocks of colour – combines considerable painterly drama with great visual delicacy. It is an art of tremendous vigour and of acute concentration and care: his work involves an ongoing negotiation between the monumental and the intimate.