TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/081489/08148900.065

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 96 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.