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

The colors in "Wall of Light" can be somber, composed of grays, blacks, whites, creams and earth tones, complicated and balanced by other hues (Floating Grey Wall, 2002). Or they can heat up with febrile reds, only to be cooled by blue and off-white (Wall of Light Red, 1998). They can bloom in yellows (Wall of Light Beach, 2001), an enigmatic green (Green Pale Light, 2002) or tender pinks (Wall of Light Pink, 1998). Location and situation, as has been noted, are of crucial importance to Scully, and he names his paintings according to place, season, time or combinations of all three, as well as by colors. Examples include Wall of Light April (2000), with its blacks and grays lightened by silvered and pale shades that suggest the cold. thin brightness of an early spring day; Wall of Light Desert Night (1999), with its cool twilight-to-night shades contrasted with bands of clouded whites; and Big Red Wall of Light (2000), which is just that, and beautiful. He also names paintings after people, such as Niels (2001). All his titles memorialize subjective experience in the guise of matter-of-fact designations.

The impact of this series does not depend on scale alone. A dozen smaller paintings pack their own punches. With its pale flesh tones, matte blacks and voluptuous reds edged in yellows that flash pure gold, like a light seeping through--the immanent within the facade of materiality--Wall of Light Red Red (2001), for example, at 45 by 55 inches, is arguably the most seductive painting in the exhibition.

At 61, Sean Scully has mellowed. While the stance and gestures in his paintings remain large and authoritative, the roughness of much of his earlier work has been converted into something more vulnerable, at times elegiac, with physical power balanced by emotional strength, materiality by spirit. Tension remains, but it is less aggressive and runs deeper. Referring to Monet--specifically his "Rouen Cathedral" paintings, which Scully describes as stone dissolving into spirit--he says that he, too, wants to make his paintings simultaneously tangible, metaphoric and metaphysical. In "Wall of Light," he has more than succeeded.

(1.) Unless otherwise indicated, all first-hand quotes come from an unpublished transcript of a conversation between Sean Scully and Elyse Topalian, deputy vice president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about his series "Wall of Light," taped on Sept. 6, 2006, in the artist's studio in Barcelona.

(2.) Quoted by Anne L. Strauss, "Complements and Antidotes, Works on Paper," in Sean Scully: Wall of Light, ed. by Stephen Bennett Phillips, New York, Rizzoli International Publications Inc., 2005, p. 111.

(3.) Scully, who is an eloquent and persuasive advocate of his own work and that of artists he admires, has just published Sean Scully: Resistance and Persistence, Selected Writings, ed. by Florence Ingleby, London and New York, Merrell, 2006, which includes essays on a variety of subjects.