Sean Scully

Entre Ciel et Terre is Sean Scully’s first exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. Created for the most part during the pandemic, the paintings suggest a connection with nature and an inner world of memory in troubled times. Introducing his new Mirroring paintings, along with a selection of works from his landmark series, the exhibition demonstrates how Sean Scully has marked contemporary abstraction.

Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, Scully is renowned for his expressive and spiritual use of colour and form. As the exhibition title Entre Ciel et Terre (Between Heaven and Earth) indicates, his art hovers between two realms: the terrestrial, conveying a sense of materiality, rawness and sensuality, and the celestial, opening onto the infinite.

Painted in oil on aluminium, the large-scale Mirroring works are divided into two sets of coloured stripes that mirror each other with variations. Between each colour field, the artist has left the metal surface visible. The overall composition, with the rhythm of the horizontal bands, brings to mind the pages of a book or musical score.

Since 2016, Scully has taken to painting on both aluminium and copper. Responding to paint in different ways, each support creates a rhythm and tempo of its own. This choice of polished surface also connects with the artist’s interest in how his art can absorb and reflect meaning in relationship to the viewer.

The colours range from soft and sensual hues, such as a rose that references the saturated and humid qualities that Scully perceives in Pierre Bonnard’s (1867–1947) use of the same colour. Counterbalancing this effect, the creamy and dark greys allude to the melancholy and grittiness of the cities the artist has lived in, including London, New York, Berlin, Munich and Barcelona.

The gradations of tone and combinations of colours allow for a sensorial and emotional impact, enhanced by the shimmering effect of the metal. The paintings capture ever-changing landscapes, with horizons that appear to shimmer and shift within the pictorial frame. Although they are strongly abstract, Sean Scully’s paintings are informed by life, experience and sensation.

The Landline series has been at the heart of Sean Scully’s practice for the past decade. The works were originally inspired by a photograph that the artist took of a seascape from a cliff in Norfolk, England: ‘I try to paint this sense of the elemental coming together, of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending.’

Scully has often expressed his admiration for French artists, in particular Claude Monet, André Derain and Vincent van Gogh, who spent most of his life in France. The various shades of yellow and blue in Star (2021) refer to the bold tones used by van Gogh to portray the southern light.

In recent years, Scully has also increasingly turned to sculpture, creating monumental structures that engage with primary forms while humanising their geometries. As in his paintings, these sculptures feature individual rectangular sections that slot together, maintaining his ongoing interest in interlocking brick forms.

‘My idea was to make sculptures that had no space in them. So all I did was three-dimensionalised my paintings. I didn't think about the problems of sculpture. I made a big sculpture in Aix en Provence called Wall of Light Cubed. It is just one of my paintings cubed.’