178
138 Sean Scully (b.1945)
Passenger Line Black (2000)
Oil on linen, 48 x 38cm (18.9 x 15”)
Signed, inscribed and dated verso
Exhibited: Galerie Lelong, Paris (original exhibition label verso)
Painted in the same year as
Wall of Light Orange Yellow
, (Dublin City Gallery), which
featured as one of Ireland’s favourite paintings in RTE’s recent television series,
Passenger
Line Black
uses Scully’s familiar device of a window or second panel of paint subsumed
into a larger composition.The smooth opaque black and grey of the background painting is
contrasted by the thicker impasto and industrial paint of the smaller work which uses more
intense and more obvious brushstrokes.The cutting into the surface of the larger canvas and
the placing of a second painting within it also draws attention to the physical construction
of the artwork as an object as well as disrupting the conventional idea of an abstract paint-
ing as a unified system of form and colour.
Scully’s deployment of the window device relates to his experience of living in cities espe-
cially London where he began his career as an artist in the 1960s. According to the artist, ‘a
window is a promise like a doorway’, that is a way into the painting and a way of relieving
the tension of the painting surface. The device is also well known in the work of Henri
Matisse, an artist whom Scully admires. Like Matisse, Scully’s work is often triggered by a
response to the tangible sensation of light falling on the surface of a wall or building.
The use of grids and lines of colour in
Passenger Line Black
also refers back into the history
of modern art. Its occurrence in Scully’s practice has been compared with the work of the
abstract expressionist painter,Mark Rothko and even the earlier pioneer of abstract art, Piet
Mondrian. Like these artists, Scully believes strongly that art should have a transformative
function on the viewer. While referring to this spiritual tradition of modern art his work
is equally influenced by many of the non art contexts in which colour and pattern assert
themselves such as the dyed fabrics of Morocco, the painted hoardings of construction sites
in New York and the reflections of strong colour on the walls of Mayan temples in Mexico.
Scully’s acclaimed use of abstraction blends the metaphysical with the physical, providing,
as in this work, a contemporary and highly distinctive version of abstract art.
Dr. Roisin Kennedy
April 2014
€40,000 - 60,000
