Sean Scully at Knoedler and Galerie Lelong - New York - Brief Article

Over the years, Sean Scully has remade the stripe painting into his own image. Considered by many to be one of the foremost painters of the present time, he has disclosed--just when you thought you knew all you needed to know about his sonorously colored abstractions--a more representational impulse to his art. Scully's architectonic, and often heroic, compositions are not, it turns out, purely formal. Like Ellsworth Kelly, Scully takes photographs, and has done so since the mid-'60s. First shown in 1997 at Lelong, his photos of land, water and buildings in familiar and remote places are closely related to the structure and spirit of his paintings, putting into question what is and what is not abstraction. In two concurrent exhibitions, recent pastels and watercolors (Lelong) and paintings (Knoedler) shared equal billing with his lesser-known photographs.

"Art Horizon" (2001), an arresting suite of 10 C-prints, stretched across the main wall at Lelong. The richly hued, two-tiered, horizontal stripes of the multipart panorama did double-duty as abstractions and representations. Sweeping, somber black strokes over smoldering red, or soft gray over deep gold, read as apocalyptic or pensive landscapes and seascapes as well as what they really are--photographed details of his monumental "Wall of Light" paintings. Meanwhile, in a nearby C-print of blue sky, sparkling blue water and golden land, the reverse occurs: the landscape reads like a striped Scully painting. The largest photos--Siena Door I, II and III, each measuring 71 1/2 by 48 inches and almost door-sized--showed entrances and boarded-up walls, "found" assertions of Scully's sense of order.

At Knoedler, where painting ruled, three magisterial new canvases--Wall of Light Tara, Wall of Light Fall and Wall of Light Peru (all 2000)--plus a number of gorgeous, placemat-size oils dominated the main floor. The "Walls," full of pomp, angled rhythms and vibrant brushstrokes, were a powerful presence, reminding us of how spatially imposing Scully's paintings can be, how resonant their mix of materiality and metaphysics. Yet the smaller paintings, their colors muted but ripe (with his signature reds, bronzed and tawny yellows, smoky grays and blacks clogged with light) were the more astonishing. Perfectly pitched, delicately nuanced and intimate, they had lost none of their impact with the reduction in scale. Another selection of photographs was installed downstairs, including two radiant black-and-white images of simple stone structures. The remainder concentrated on the gridded and barred beauty of doors, columns, windows and surfaces in such places as London, Santo Domingo and Barcelona. These photographs, with their own abundant merits, lent a satisfying specificity to Scully's many-splendored kingdom.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group