Today's Masters: Dual Nature
July 2008
During a trip to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in 1983, he painted a watercolor inspired by the shifting light and shadows on the facades of ancient Mayan temples and ruins. Thereafter, his paintings became softer and less rigid, revealing his brushstrokes and an expressive layering of colors. This new aesthetic course laid the foundation for his renowned, ongoing "Wall of Light" series of paintings, prints, watercolors and pastels.
The tactile layers of paint in the "Wall of Light" paintings not only correspond to layers of information, feeling and time, they have a distinctive architectural quality, a consciously built solidity conveyed by their bricklike masses, which serve as a literal wall for the play of light. A "sad, falling light," as Scully, who is admittedly terrified of the dark, refers to it, seeps through and around these grids, competing with an obstinate darkness. For Scully, the grid itself is a deeply powerful, ancient symbol, which, in its inherent duality of horizontal and vertical, signifies the struggle between "the individual and the collective," self and other. "My work tries to hold these ideas in balance, and although I’m always striving for unity, I never reach the point of perfect wholeness," he says. "I never give up the personality. There’s always the danger that if you abandon yourself entirely to the collective, you lose something important."
While the cracks, divisions, and spaces between the bars of color in the "Wall of Light" series symbolize for Scully the perpetual uncertainty of the human condition, they also infuse his walls with "hope and possibility, suggesting that the walls are not impenetrable," he says. "Walls are what we use to construct our civilization, but they also create barriers and separation. I try to show that the walls can be overcome." These works also evoke various landscapes that have resonated with the itinerant artist, who maintains studios in New York, Munich, and Barcelona. And their woven surfaces hold memories of his childhood, when Scully says he "wanted to darn everyone’s socks," and his mother taught him how to knit.
In Scully’s work, scale and aesthetic relationships also convey meaning. His paintings, for example, range from the boldly monumental to the delicately small. "Some of the small paintings are so tender and intimate that they can affect you in a way that a big painting cannot," he says. Relationships between forms and colors, light and shadow, express his own deeply felt relationships with people and the natural world. Indeed, many of his works carry titles referring to loved ones, seasons, places, atmospheric conditions, and times of day.
Throughout his career, Scully has also constructed relationships within and between canvases, producing "inset" paintings, in which he embeds small canvases into larger ones, as well as paintings that incorporate two or more canvases bolted together. In another break with the painterly tradition, he is currently making large paintings on aluminum panels.
Scully has been a painter-pioneer from the very beginning. "In the late 1970s and ’80s, when he was emerging as an artist, people were saying that painting and abstraction were dead," says Jo Ann Moser, senior curator of graphic art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "But Scully, along with artists such as Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold, revitalized abstract painting, showing that there was still much to be done with the medium. He doesn’t like to think of his work as completely abstract, however, because it is so loaded with emotional meaning." In his emotionality, honest vulnerability and cultural complexity, Scully shares a kinship with painters like Cy Twombly and Luc Tuymans. Yet in his desire to create art that "feeds off the world of the senses," he transcends that world. "There is something inconsolable in the artist that makes him create," Scully says. "The artist has to find a way to expose his wound while transforming it into something sublime. Art has to become a bridge of experience for others, a bridge to something bigger than ourselves."
In his quest for unity, Scully has be queathed us a profound beauty. His courageous voyage into his own universally human heart of darkness reveals hopeful glimpses of light. For he has imbued his art with an aspiration for what T.S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," calls "the still point of the turning world."
The tactile layers of paint in the "Wall of Light" paintings not only correspond to layers of information, feeling and time, they have a distinctive architectural quality, a consciously built solidity conveyed by their bricklike masses, which serve as a literal wall for the play of light. A "sad, falling light," as Scully, who is admittedly terrified of the dark, refers to it, seeps through and around these grids, competing with an obstinate darkness. For Scully, the grid itself is a deeply powerful, ancient symbol, which, in its inherent duality of horizontal and vertical, signifies the struggle between "the individual and the collective," self and other. "My work tries to hold these ideas in balance, and although I’m always striving for unity, I never reach the point of perfect wholeness," he says. "I never give up the personality. There’s always the danger that if you abandon yourself entirely to the collective, you lose something important."
While the cracks, divisions, and spaces between the bars of color in the "Wall of Light" series symbolize for Scully the perpetual uncertainty of the human condition, they also infuse his walls with "hope and possibility, suggesting that the walls are not impenetrable," he says. "Walls are what we use to construct our civilization, but they also create barriers and separation. I try to show that the walls can be overcome." These works also evoke various landscapes that have resonated with the itinerant artist, who maintains studios in New York, Munich, and Barcelona. And their woven surfaces hold memories of his childhood, when Scully says he "wanted to darn everyone’s socks," and his mother taught him how to knit.
In Scully’s work, scale and aesthetic relationships also convey meaning. His paintings, for example, range from the boldly monumental to the delicately small. "Some of the small paintings are so tender and intimate that they can affect you in a way that a big painting cannot," he says. Relationships between forms and colors, light and shadow, express his own deeply felt relationships with people and the natural world. Indeed, many of his works carry titles referring to loved ones, seasons, places, atmospheric conditions, and times of day.
Throughout his career, Scully has also constructed relationships within and between canvases, producing "inset" paintings, in which he embeds small canvases into larger ones, as well as paintings that incorporate two or more canvases bolted together. In another break with the painterly tradition, he is currently making large paintings on aluminum panels.
Scully has been a painter-pioneer from the very beginning. "In the late 1970s and ’80s, when he was emerging as an artist, people were saying that painting and abstraction were dead," says Jo Ann Moser, senior curator of graphic art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "But Scully, along with artists such as Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold, revitalized abstract painting, showing that there was still much to be done with the medium. He doesn’t like to think of his work as completely abstract, however, because it is so loaded with emotional meaning." In his emotionality, honest vulnerability and cultural complexity, Scully shares a kinship with painters like Cy Twombly and Luc Tuymans. Yet in his desire to create art that "feeds off the world of the senses," he transcends that world. "There is something inconsolable in the artist that makes him create," Scully says. "The artist has to find a way to expose his wound while transforming it into something sublime. Art has to become a bridge of experience for others, a bridge to something bigger than ourselves."
In his quest for unity, Scully has be queathed us a profound beauty. His courageous voyage into his own universally human heart of darkness reveals hopeful glimpses of light. For he has imbued his art with an aspiration for what T.S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," calls "the still point of the turning world."
Galeria Carles Tache, Barcelona
011.34.93.487.8836
Galerie Lelong, New York
212.315.0470, galerielelong.com
LA Louver, Venice, Calif.
310.822.4955, lalouver.com
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
011.44.20.7409.3344, timothytaylorgallery.com
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