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拍品专文
Radiant bands fill Sean Scully’s monumental Wall of Light Reef, together forming an architectural lattice of rich, sumptuous colour. Soft and yielding, the surface of the painting is arranged in a loose construction of vertical and horizontal rectangles. The painterly blocks of cranberry, cream, black and pale pink are simultaneously controlled and expressive, self-contained yet united, each evincing the gestural traces of the artist’s hand. Scully’s characteristically energetic brushwork adds a tactile dimension to a pictorial field that rejects any sense of narrative hierarchy. Even without recognisable imagery, however, Wall of Light Reef possesses a complex, almost sublime sense of presence.
Painted in 2012, Wall of Light Reef forms part of the artist’s celebrated series Wall of Light, which emerged following trips to Mexico in the early 1980s. While there, Scully found himself captivated by the play of light and shadow across the many ancient Mayan ruins. One day, while sitting on a beach in Zihuatanejo, a city on the Pacific coast, he made a small watercolour of his impressions, writing, beneath the image, ‘Wall of Light’. Yet upon returning to New York, Scully chose not to take up the subject, focusing instead on the sculptural canvases he was already in the process of creating. It was not until 1998 that he finally returned to the theme, embarking upon a more formal, and extensive, exploration of the vibrant motif.
Scully was far from the first to be seduced by Mexico’s architectural heritage. Artists such as Josef Albers and Donald Judd had previously created works of art in response to the built environment they encountered while traveling through the country. The interaction of colour in Albers’ Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe series, especially, seems to be echoed in Scully’s Wall of Light: both painters teased out a chromatic dynamism based on light and geometry. Although Mexico inspired the series, many of the Wall of Light canvases allude to other locales. They were painted primarily in Barcelona, New York, London, and the countryside outside of Munich. Utopian in aim, Scully sees his series as an attempt to ‘make a wall that is not a brutal divider’ (in conversation with D. Carrier, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2018). This series has achieved wide acclaim and was the subject of a 2005 exhibition organised by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., that travelled to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among other institutions.
Scully’s practice is often discussed within the context of Colour Field painting. Such an inheritance is evident in Wall of Light Reef, in which the chromatic bands recall canvases by Mark Rothko: both artists used colour as a structural force. Scully, however, has been influenced not just by post-war abstraction but also by European painting traditions, and he has cited artists such as Cimabue, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard as equally inspirational. Instead of a dogmatic abstraction, Scully believes in art’s ability to generate its own narrative, and he endeavours to imbue his paintings with sensations and connotations, explaining that, in his work, ‘you have associations with the horizon, with blood, with earth, with grey mist, with the sky in the morning and the sky at night, and then this very sombre black bar, which is about finality’ (quoted in F. Nayeri, ‘Sean Scully Is an Art Star, but He “Won’t Bend the Knee for Anyone”’, New York Times, 29 August 2024). In Wall of Light Reef, the warm tonalities evoke the solidity of stone glowing under a warm, late afternoon sun, their almost sculptural presence blurring the line between abstraction and image, invention and reality.
Painted in 2012, Wall of Light Reef forms part of the artist’s celebrated series Wall of Light, which emerged following trips to Mexico in the early 1980s. While there, Scully found himself captivated by the play of light and shadow across the many ancient Mayan ruins. One day, while sitting on a beach in Zihuatanejo, a city on the Pacific coast, he made a small watercolour of his impressions, writing, beneath the image, ‘Wall of Light’. Yet upon returning to New York, Scully chose not to take up the subject, focusing instead on the sculptural canvases he was already in the process of creating. It was not until 1998 that he finally returned to the theme, embarking upon a more formal, and extensive, exploration of the vibrant motif.
Scully was far from the first to be seduced by Mexico’s architectural heritage. Artists such as Josef Albers and Donald Judd had previously created works of art in response to the built environment they encountered while traveling through the country. The interaction of colour in Albers’ Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe series, especially, seems to be echoed in Scully’s Wall of Light: both painters teased out a chromatic dynamism based on light and geometry. Although Mexico inspired the series, many of the Wall of Light canvases allude to other locales. They were painted primarily in Barcelona, New York, London, and the countryside outside of Munich. Utopian in aim, Scully sees his series as an attempt to ‘make a wall that is not a brutal divider’ (in conversation with D. Carrier, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2018). This series has achieved wide acclaim and was the subject of a 2005 exhibition organised by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., that travelled to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among other institutions.
Scully’s practice is often discussed within the context of Colour Field painting. Such an inheritance is evident in Wall of Light Reef, in which the chromatic bands recall canvases by Mark Rothko: both artists used colour as a structural force. Scully, however, has been influenced not just by post-war abstraction but also by European painting traditions, and he has cited artists such as Cimabue, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard as equally inspirational. Instead of a dogmatic abstraction, Scully believes in art’s ability to generate its own narrative, and he endeavours to imbue his paintings with sensations and connotations, explaining that, in his work, ‘you have associations with the horizon, with blood, with earth, with grey mist, with the sky in the morning and the sky at night, and then this very sombre black bar, which is about finality’ (quoted in F. Nayeri, ‘Sean Scully Is an Art Star, but He “Won’t Bend the Knee for Anyone”’, New York Times, 29 August 2024). In Wall of Light Reef, the warm tonalities evoke the solidity of stone glowing under a warm, late afternoon sun, their almost sculptural presence blurring the line between abstraction and image, invention and reality.