Sean Scully’s Emotional Abstraction
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In abstract art, color can be a more significant message than form. Yves Klein declared that the only way to liberate color from lines is through monochrome. He defined blue as an absolute abstraction, saying that blue has no dimension. His blue monochrome is also ultimately a color. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Mark Rothko have different colors, but they became the ancestors of modern art through their different languages of color.
In Sean Scully's paintings, color is both a medium and a message. Sometimes, humble and visionary, sometimes intense and resistant emotions are conveyed through subtle rendezvous of different colors and lines. Abstract artists create colors, dots, lines, and planes to express their thoughts, ideas, art, and life directly or indirectly. The artist is the medium.
According to research results from the psychology of art, artworks with symmetrical lines and planes convey a sense of familiarity and positive emotions to the audience. Studies on visual patterns suggest that the human brain unconsciously seeks familiarity with visual symmetry. The nerves that recognize art differ from those that recognize standard, general objects. This confirms that the brain regions related to emotional experiences and goal setting are more active when appreciating works of art [1]. This means that humans are hard-wired to respond to certain patterns emotionally.
The colors that appear in his abstract paintings are generally soft and rich and have a ‘sense of depth’ that overwhelms the entire screen. These colors burst, sometimes brightly, sometimes melancholy, as if the knots of memories accumulated within the artist collide. Textured stripes and layered color patterns form emotional abstractions and soft geometric grid-based works. Some large-scale paintings and sculptures are appealing without any specific narrative, as the medium and form they are made serve as a message, much like the minimalist architectural designs of architect Mies van der Rohe.
In particular, like classical architecture, grid-structured works are often neat and linear and have a very flexible sense of space. These patterns also retain a solid and sophisticated formal beauty like a European cathedral's colorful stained glass or mosaic blocks. They also remind us of a hazy seascape beyond the horizon, visible and invisible. In his memory, fragments of the inevitable memory of the sea remain in every corner of the cells and seem to operate like a remote control. The surface of Scully’s abstract art seems filled with suggested peace, but internally, clear consciousness creates subtle waves and tensions. A straight line may seem like an infinite series of lines that never meet, but they are unpredictable entities that eventually meet at the end. It is like the principle that if you walk the Earth in a straight line, you will eventually return to the same place.
Installation view, He Art Museum
Minimalism is perceived as a framework of bondage established by purists because it is an extremely abstract art, and its explicit form and expression reveal the essence of the art form and materials. If contemporary art were to put forth an ideology and a platform, minimalism would take the lead. The critical point is that Scully’s interest and involvement can be understood in that the period when he arrived in New York was still in the aftermath and power of the Minimal movement. Minimalism can be seen as the logical outcome of a century-old tradition of abstraction and as an art-historical designation for the work of highly politicized and intellectual artists who, from the late 1960s onwards, reduced art expression to the brink of extinction.
Sean Scully in the 1970s
Fort #2, Sean Scully, oil on canvas, 213.7 × 214. 2 cm, 1980 © Sean Scully
It seems that during this period, Scully transformed the multicolored bands and stripes of post-painterly abstraction that he had been focusing on and instead took on monochrome works in a consistent black and gray tone. Having used gray and black primarily in his early years, he seems to have regarded black, in particular, as a harmonious and comforting prophetic light. Critic William Feaver, who was very interested in the work of young artist Sean Scully at the time, commented on his work, saying, “It expresses the extreme in any state,” and critic Sam Hunter categorizes Scully as a post-minimalist rather than a full-fledged minimalist. “His dazzling and fantastical paintings have been transformed into almost monochrome, formally consistent works. They are marked by extremism and are identified as post-minimalism [2].”
Abstract Expressionism began to lose its enormous influence in the mid-1960s, but his art in the mid-1970s, when he was at the center of the minimalist scene, could be seen as the beginning of something new. However, he gradually distanced himself from the anti-humanistic attitude of cold minimalism and gradually returned to his original world. Today, critics and art historians distinguish his art from abstract expressionism or minimalism and specifically describe it as “emotional abstraction,” which is an acknowledgment and reflection of the aesthetic rhetoric that only Scully’s art has.
Installation view, He Art Museum
The legends and typicalities of the past that led the grand narrative in today’s visual culture scene have already disappeared, and pluralistic trends are establishing a new order. As the various isms that stirred up the 20th century disappear, biologically hybrid cross-cultural phenomena become more prominent. He developed a more solid self-world as he experienced and expanded his genres from painting to sculpture, prints, pastels, and photography. This is why his art's spiritual depth and presence seem to grow.
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The aesthetic achievement of minimalism is that, despite its radicalism, it offers a highly refined form of beauty, and the emergence of this form in art history is virtually unprecedented. In particular, interest in the Russian Constructivism and Suprematism movements and the value of minimization, which reduces excess attached to expression and makes moderation a virtue, were accepted as meaningful and beautiful. The fact that it was possible to produce works of art in factories for the first time in history greatly inspired minimalist artists and sculptors.
Despite its rebelliousness, Abstract Expressionism embraced various artistic styles while respecting heroic gestures and artistic subjectivity. Nevertheless, the international influence of these two artistic trends was the first American art movement that placed New York at the center of the art world. It was also the first time in history that the role of critics was very prominent in the visual culture scene, and critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg were brought to the forefront of art history and the modern art movement.
Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism were the highlights of modernist art forms. Still, when artist Sean Scully looked at them with mature eyes, they were an ‘American phenomenon’ that heralded an era. At the time, the declaration that “nothing unnecessary is essential”, which was the creed of minimalism, and the world of color diversity and emotion that Scully himself pursued can be seen as having an emotional distance. His persistence and differentiation strategy until his art gained the energy to become self-reliant through independent selection is essential evidence that Scully’s art is alive today.
Backs and Fronts, Sean Scully, 1981 © Sean Scully
Scully can be seen as a humanist of European origin who was far from the laws of aesthetic absoluteness or extremes pursued by the Greenbergians. In particular, his aesthetic background at the time must have been that of a poor artist whose roots in spontaneous and self-generated ‘Scully art’ were more desperate. He also seemed to recognize this fact then and later pointed out the limitations of cold and theoretical modernist art and the problem of dehumanization through various channels. And the fact that its decline was inevitable was also mentioned several times. Today, his presence can be seen as a result of his material differentiation, such as the beautiful combination of striped colors. Still, the essential reason comes from his detailed insight, flexibility of thought, and depth of the spirit of reasoning.
As many have pointed out, the part that draws attention to Scully's art is the spiritual depth and resonance that erupts from the basis of delicate sensibility. The formal ancestor of Scully's art can be seen as emotional abstract expressionism, but the root and spiritual ancestor contained in the colors and textures is himself. The spirit of humility and resonance shown in his works seem to have played a part in proving this fact. The soulful colors and textures, the cohesion of the stripes, and the constructive interaction of the planes that connect the vertical and horizontal bring to mind the image of a social community.
Passenger Night, Sean Scully, oil on linen, 182.9 × 182.9 cm，1998 © Sean Scully
I think that the humanistic background of Scully's art is related to the social community spirit or inclusiveness of his art. His belief that "abstract art also has a body" refers to the artist's implication and spiritual value inherent in abstraction. And I think it is about the social consensus spirit and the healing function of art inherent in his art. This is connected to the aesthetics of archipelago, which has a very interesting post-ideological and post-power rhetoric. This is because beautiful communities that form clusters and neighbor each other like small islands are a blessing and tolerance that allows art to play a role in contributing to social consensus. It will be a catalyst that can overcome the ideological hegemony, division, fragmentation, and extreme segmentation of the past modern or post-modern, and discuss the internal agreement of beautiful hybridity.
Installation view, He Art Museum
Art, regardless of its genre, should be loved and cared for, not an object of hatred. The colors used by Scully convey a message of neat and sophisticated splendor and harmony, as well as fierce conflict. In addition, the harmonious combination of colors and the neat composition of stripes stand out because they are the hidden materials that are not easily noticeable in his art, such as time, space, memory, and humans. In particular, the modest yet monochromatic composition of black and white is like an amalgam that shows the poetic margin of Scully's paintings.
Sean Scully seems to live like a nomad on the Eurasian continent, endlessly traveling across the ocean to somewhere. Artists are travelers who cannot stop their journey of consciousness and nomads surrounded by an uneasy prophetic loneliness whose art cannot end even after life ends.
I asked him. Why is the title of the exhibition being held at the He Art Museum in China “Away from the Sea”? His answer is simple. Aren’t (me and my work) far away across the ocean and in China? The identity of the words contained in his short answer, or not visible, are probably these: sea, land, art, loneliness, labor, hassle, stickiness, fate, and longing.
About Artist
Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in South London. Wanting to be an artist from an early age, Scully attended evening classes at the Central School of Art in London from 1962 to 1965, and enrolled full time at Croydon College of Art, London from 1965 until 1968. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Newcastle University in 1972. He was awarded the Frank Knox Fellowship to Harvard University in 1972, where he visited the United States for the first time. In 1975, he moved to New York full-time. Today, he lives and works between New York and London.
With a career that spans more than five decades, he has received numerous accolades and has been the subject of multiple touring exhibitions. In 2014, he became the first Western artist to have a career-length retrospective in China. Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014 included over 100 paintings and travelled from Shanghai to Beijing. Scully was named a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013 and has received honorary degrees from institutions such as the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; the National University of Ireland, Dublin; Universitas Miguel Hernandez, Valencia; Burren College of Art, National University of Ireland; Newcastle University, UK, among others. A series of essays and conversations between Scully and the esteemed art critic Arthur Danto was published by Hatje Cantz in 2014, and a collection of Scully’s own writing, selected speeches and interviews, Inner, was released in 2016.
Author
Lee Yongwoo
Professor at the College of
Architecture and Urban Planning
Tongji University
