Light masonry: since 1998, Sean Scully has been laboring on an ambitious series, now numbering some 200 works, devoted to the phenomenology of walls. In a selection installed in sky-lit galleries at the Met, these paintings, watercolors and prints take on vivid life

Art in America, Jan, 2007 by Lilly Wei

Sean Scully recalls that he was sitting on a beach in Zihuatanejo--it was, he believes, in 1984, on his second trip to Mexico--enthralled, no doubt, by the glorious, absolute light of the south. There, he made a small watercolor, a relatively new medium for him at the time. As described by the artist, the painting was "a little wall" composed of blocks that were "vaguely geometric." (1) Scully called it Wall of Light and put it away, but in 1998, after he had made many subsequent trips to Mexico and other sun-blasted regions, it reemerged as the first of a series, still ongoing, his most accomplished and evocative body of work to date, consisting of oil paintings, watercolors, pastels and aquatints.

In this "Wall of Light" series--in which each medium reflects the qualities of the others as "complements and antidotes," (2) the artist says--Scully transforms materiality into something ineffable as he subtly constructs his version of the modernist grid in compounded, sensuous colors, suffused and seamed by radiant light. The series grew with the artist's attraction to the stone walls of Chichen Itza, Palenque, Copan, Uxmal and other smaller sites, each with a "mystical presence." Scully was drawn to the walls' surfaces, their heaviness and stacked masonry. In particular, he was fascinated by the way the walls change color as the light alters from one time of day to another: "A yellow in the morning will be pale and it will be deep orange in the afternoon. And a green will change to gray in the morning and to a strange blue-black color at night."

More than 200 works currently constitute "Wall of Light." These have a variable, allover, post-and-lintel-like arrangement of bundled vertical and horizontal bars with shifting and contingent relationships. Scully refers to these bars as bricks and, in fact, likens his process of painting to making a wall. He lavishly applies layer after layer of costly oil paint with cheap, two-inch-thick housepainter's brushes he buys in bulk in Italy. They suit his purposes; he doesn't paint with fine strokes. While Maya ruins and Mexican light may have jump-started "Wall of Light," the works have, in fact, been made in a number of places where the artist has studios--New York, Bar celona, Mooseurach (outside of Munich) and London--and where he is helped by studies, photographs and other aids to memory. The series also recollects light from elsewhere: the Nevada desert, say, or the stark, wave-washed islands off Ireland. Scully (born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in London) travels widely, often preferring places that are "brutal" and "primitive," where he can confront an "essential truth."

On view through Jan. 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and originating at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.), the exhibition "Sean Scully: Wall of Light" is revelatory. For those who admire Scully's work, it will provide a confirmation. For those who do not--for those who dismiss him as the "stripe painter"--it should be required viewing. Mounted in the Metropolitan's Lila Acheson Wallace wing (where works from its permanent collection were taken down for this event), the exhibition is a spectacular pairing of painting and site. The 60 well-chosen works, from monumental to tiny, are of consistently high quality and are expertly installed on walls and in cases. Included among the velvety pastels and the translucent watercolors and prints is the seminal 1984 watercolor from Zihuatanejo with its bars of blacks, burnt oranges, roses and blues. The 18 oil paintings, some very large double panels at a scale approaching wall size, dominate the long, sky-lit gallery. Awash in natural light, the paintings are illuminated so that their full spectrums of color and painterly nuances are visible. From a palpably tactile, brushy, even choppy facture to one that is soft, blurred and seemingly liquid, each painting possesses its own quality of light--milky or clear, moody or triumphant--depending on the color scheme as well as the weather and the time of day the viewer sees it.

Scully has merged the art-historical with the contemporary, European styles with American Abstract Expressionism, and cites as sources a wide range of artists: Cezanne, Monet, van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, Rembrandt, Velazquez, de Kooning, Rothko, Kline and Still, saying he is influenced by their paintings' particular palettes, densities, brushwork, structures, light and auras. And while the individual works in the "Wall of Light" series may look similar at first glance, each is, of course, different from the next in composition, ambience and associations. In this, the suite is like the oeuvre of Agnes Martin, another "stripe painter" and an artist important to Scully. Morandi, too, spent much of his life painting the same thing, but his small, richly concentrated pictures of bottles and bowls famously transcend the limitations of a genre, in his case still life. Scully's painting Raphael (2004), while named for the Renaissance master, is ultimately closer to Morandi. Scully defends and embraces his own "simplicity," as he puts it, which he says allows him to express nuance and deep feeling. "It is very difficult to maintain that kind of simplicity, to keep doing something with a degree of fidelity that allows it to deepen and unfold during the course of a human life," he says. Scully rejects the need to always come up with new ideas, to "conceptualize his paintings." (3)