TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081489/08148900.065

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.5 KB | 106 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 70

Earning His Stripes


Sean Scully makes something special of a simple motif

By Robert Hughes


    A painting being so much more than its subject, you can't
pin down an artist by naming his favorite motif. From Mondrian
and the Russian constructivists on, many an abstract artist has
gone for the stripe in all its apparent simplicity -- the line
that baldly, mysteriously becomes a form in itself. Yet their
paintings are not like one another's: there is no confusing the
precise black vibration of a Bridget Riley with the effect of
one of Barnett Newman's "zips" or the slightly blurred, funereal
pinstriping of an early Frank Stella. Today the stripe continues
to linger in the wings of late modernism and is the adopted sign
of one of the most toughly individual artists in America, Sean
Scully. What, after so many other stripes, has he made of it?
Not the emblem of a lost utopianism but something fierce,
concrete and obsessive, with a grandeur shaded by awkwardness
-- a stripe like no one else's.

    Scully is 44, a pale, knobbly-faced Irishman who was born
in Dublin, studied in London and since 1975 has lived in New
York City. The show of his work that is currently traveling in
Europe (it has already been at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery,
is now at Munich's Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and will
go on to Madrid in September) is not a retrospective. It covers
his early maturity, from 1982 to 1988. But Scully has been fixed
on the stripe since he was an art student.

    At first it was an optical shimmer, a weaving of color
energy on the surface, in deference to the prevalent American
art theory of the day and, to some degree, in homage to Riley.
The work of Mark Rothko, which Scully had seen as a student, was
a presiding influence. It had shown him how a neutral and even
boring form, an imperfect rectangle, could accumulate reserves
of feeling and cogitation -- how the life of the mind and its
tentative decisions could be embodied, not just illustrated, in
pigment. And there had been a visit to Morocco in 1970; there
Scully saw stripes everywhere, dyed into awnings and djellabas
and bolts of cloth, not a theoretical form but a motif embedded,
as it were, in the landscape. Then he moved to New York and, as
he puts it in the catalog, felt driven to paint "severe,
invulnerable canvases, so I could be in this environment and not
feel exposed. I spent five years making my paintings
fortress-like."

    He let go of the clean edges and began to work thickly in
oils instead of acrylic. The grid of Scully's paintings in the
'80s speaks of two things: a desire for large order and a sense
of impending slippage, as though the columns and lintels of
paint had to be constantly tested, as though their pinning could
come apart just as the painter turned his back. They are not
smoothly designed but look somewhat improvised, like the sides
of large huts. They are very "New York" paintings, but the city
they evoke is not the foreigner's imagined grid of perfect
planes; rather it is gritty, heavy, slapped-together lower
Manhattan, where Scully has his studio: the hoardings of warped
plywood, the metal slabs patching the street.

    Nobody could take these paintings for supergraphics. Their
mood is, above all, reflective. They aspire to a rough, Doric
calm. They do not move; or when they do, it is by a slow
pressure of grainy abutting edges or, in a work like No Neo,
1984, by the slight bulging of stripes against their neighbors,
like the entasis of a classical column. (The title means
something; Scully wanted his painting to resist the sense of
recycling that pervaded the '80s, neo-this and neo-that. "The
art that interests me," he says flatly, "is heroic art.")

    The sense of internal pressure confers urgency on these big
surfaces and turns them into something other, and more
physically compelling, than flat pattern. It's not that Scully
has any strong sculptural impulse; when he makes one slab of a
painting project an inch or two above the adjoining surface, it
is still not meant to be seen in the round or to suggest
material weight. But he does want to give the image the
distinctness of a body, asserting itself against your gaze.

    The world keeps peeping in, especially in Scully's color,
which is richly organic and never blatant. Its tawny ochers and
deep blues suggest landscape, though in a distant way. The
whites in Pale Fire, 1988, are not flat white but a subtle paste
applied over a warm brown ground in rapidly varying touches, so
that they have the visual elasticity of flesh. Scully is a
conservative, measured colorist. His sense of art, the seemingly
obsolete act of communicating by smearing mud on cloth, is
anchored in the past. You can see traces of his idols throughout
-- especially, in his liking for silvery grays, pinks and a
constant regulating black, Velasquez.

    The paint goes on thickly but not with abandon. The surface
seems to store light, like stone. It is opaque; you can't see
through it or even into it. It is not about space. Besides, the
inlaid, modular, even puzzle-like surfaces of Scully's recent
canvases prevent the eye from roaming them too freely. Stray
out of one box and you finish in another, not on a free horizon.
Hence the density, the lack of spaces between things, which adds
to the gravity of Scully's work. It has something to do with the
largeness of architecture. But it is painting, all the way
through.