Every individual painting by Sean Scully is a study in contrasts. He splashes several smaller canvases, usually nine or so, with vertical or horizontal stripes of two complementary colors and stacks them together like a brick house. His enjoyable new series of works, entitled “Wall of Light,” is on display at The Phillips Collection through Jan. 8. The paintings are based on a trip Scully made to Mexico some 20 years ago and the sumptuous shades of the Mayan ruins he encountered there.
Operating out of studios in Chelsea, London, New York and Germany, Scully claims to draw his primary inspiration from his extensive travels, using only bold interlocking blocks of color to depict myriad scenes. One white block in a thicket of green represents a snowy mountaintop; a single orange one, a sweltering sun. Early works demonstrate a warm affection for the sandy hues of North Africa and a general familiarity with Moroccan textiles, which the artist encountered during his time there in 1969.
His influences are immediately apparent, and his technique rather simple. Upon first viewing, Scully’s style smacks of Mark Rothko, who embedded colorful rectangles within a canvas to channel his ferocious emotions.
Scully’s work, however, appears to have more depth of spirit. A connection to the entire land and history of Mexico permeates his work. A chalky, weathering texture, much like the corroded edifice of an old tin shed or the crumbling bricks of an adobe dwelling, pervades his corpus of work, rather than the passionate reds and stark contrasts of Rothko fame. Each composition is prepared by the method, popularized by Jackson Pollack, of laying the canvas flat on the studio floor and allowing the paint to drip somewhat haphazardly upon it. However, Scully studied typesetting and graphic design as an adolescent, and it shows in his precise demarcation of the color blocks.
What distinguishes the later works of the “Wall of Light” collection from the early ones is an even sharper juxtaposition of background and foreground, although Scully loses his typesetter’s precision with time. Because Scully sought to especially draw attention to the subject’s inner light, each painting begins with a base coat of white, yellow, red or orange. For the first time in his career, Scully’s works stray from a simple black undercoat, a habit he picked up when faithfully recreating the traditional garments of Morocco. “Alba” is his only work that doesn’t use any coat of black paint and is the artist’s rendering of what he calls “the shadowless night of a Mexican noon.”
In this latest collection, his impressions of landscapes give way to more abstract themes, like the moving piece “John Anthony,” which depicts the artist’s interpretation of the month of November, his late father’s favorite. Other pieces have names like “Heat,” “Desert Night,” “Beach” and “Rain,” to correspond to a variety of states in which the haze of an approaching dusk obscures the ever-vanishing sunlight, but cannot fully stifle it. It is, this indomitability of hope that, in Sean Scully’s opinion, characterizes the Mexican people, remains his foremost impression of them even 20 years after having left them.
