Sean Scully: Semblance and Perspective’s Paradox

Sean Scully: Eleuthera

The Albertina Museum
Vienna, Austria

ablertina.at

June 7 through
September 8, 2019

Exhibition Review | June 2019 | Raphy Sarkissian

As the twenty-three relatively large, oil-on-aluminum paintings on exhibit are derived from candid snapshots, several suites of prints of that imagery are also on display, along with drawings rendered with marker on paper as well as oil pastel on paper. While Eleuthera Triptych, executed in oil and oil stick on aluminum, may seem to be a formalist passage from the artist’s translations of the chromogenic digital prints first into drawings and then paintings, Scully does not necessarily follow that particular order. Nonetheless, to a given extent a visit to the Albertina Museum to view Eleuthera feels as a virtual visit to the artist’s studio, where Scully openly unveils his embrace of the snapshot as a means of steadfast painterly expression, only to sabotage photography’s dictum. Through formal and conceptual interchanges between photography, drawing and painting, this exhibition conveys a sense of intimacy to the viewer, whereby the artist’s humility is evident. As the title of the exhibition Eleuthera is derived from the feminine Greek adjective for “freedom,” these paintings of Scully are unrestrained invitations for the spectator to participate in the liberty that characterizes quotidian image-making and its subsequent artmaking.

Until these recent figurative works that date back to 2015, stripes, bands and altered grids often presented themselves as trenchant safeguards of an austere self that nonetheless could not relinquish signs of luminescence and hints of romanticism escaping through the mortars of his pictorial stoneware. And whenever Scully’s mortars would reject to emit light, a given brick may emanate hints of glow through manifest brushmarks that empower various shades of color to function as heralds of luminance that nonetheless remain reliant upon dimness. Those paintings of Scully manifest the intertwined and coexistent conditions of luminosity and darkness upon the anterior of accumulations of oil paint. Scully’s virtual bricks in dusky shades of grey exchange their Baroque restraint of coloration with the Rococo fragility of gentle coral pink, as in Wall of Light Pink Sea (2007) housed in the Albertina Museum. Through abstraction’s inherent polysemy, this painting may be read as a reconciliation of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy (1607) at the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples and François Boucher’s Allegory of Music (1764) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

A hollow coral face, rust hat, one green/one coral arm, black torso and one brown/one orange leg constitute the partly figurative depiction of Oisín in the foreground of Eleuthera [Blue Arena] (2017). This polychromatic apparition of the child is accompanied by an abstracted depiction of a pair of objects within a lush blue, circular ground. Scully extends the elemental composition through a dark blue middle ground and an orange background, revealing gestural brushstrokes that we find in Landline Mooseurach (2016), a dazzling, abstract oil-on-linen painting, whose pulsatile palette is unmistakably mirrored in Eleuthera [Blue Arena]. Yet this figurative painting of Scully is also an uncanny, coloristic metamorphosis of Number 18 (1951) and Untitled (1951) of Mark Rothko, as if the former delivered the orange, pink and white colors, while the latter gave way to the blue, green and brown ones for this expressionistic representation of Oisín.

Through various means, the formal parameters of this painting appear as extensions of the archetypal aesthetic pathway of the artist, rendering mimetic representation as an expansion of Scully’s corpus. Though this new pictorial series principally reverses the abstract methodology that has established his place within the annals of art history, the artist’s expressionistic handling of the brush is present throughout the picture surface, despite alterations in brush width for instance. This pictorial expansion of the artist’s oeuvre straightforwardly marks artmaking and parenthood as mutually inclusive through an unrestricted triangulation of the camera, ink and brush. In a revealing interview with Elisabeth Dutz, the curator of this striking exhibition, Scully explains his open-ended and optimistic view of contemporary art: “I believe we live in the greatest art age in humanity so far. Art is more powerful, more influential than it has ever been in the history of art.”[3] In addition to Scully’s revival of his mid-sixties Fauvist figuration, this Eleuthera series provides the spectator with intertwined ontological quests that touch upon sentiment, endearment and the artistic impulse as twirling reciprocities.

As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim, “Painting needs more than the skill of the draftsman who notes resemblances between human and animal forms and gets us to witness their transformation… Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that take the place of language.”[4] Kneeling within a visual field that suggests a flattened space within Eleuthera [Blue Arena], Oisín appears with a kind of black aureole defining his sky-blue territory. This is a surreal and symbolic ground framing the child with his father’s handling of the brush that is connected to a lineage of modernist painting. Here Scully pays implicit homages to Pablo Picasso through the rendering of the green arm, as if it has been lifted from, say, The Pipes of Pan (1923) or Paul Drawing (1923), both at the Musée Picasso in Paris, only to be abstracted further to take on a surreal characteristic with Fauvist coloration.

Eleuthera [Pink Arena with Navy Shirt] (2017) does not hierarchize figuration and abstraction. Rather, it incorporates them throughout the composition that at once asserts the flatness and material reality of the medium, only to undo that through a blue circular band which envelopes the figure of Oisín set within a pink rounded terrain, generating an elusive sense of perspective. The chromatic exuberance and circular composition here may attach the work to a number of paintings by Henri Matisse, such as Notre-Dame in Late Afternoon (1902) of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in New York or Purple Cyclamen (circa 1911–13). This captivating painting of Scully also resonates with the coloration of the astonishing Entombment (circa 1525–28) of Jacopo Pontormo at the church of Santa Felicità in Florence, above the altar of the Capponi Chapel. By signaling at Matisse and Pontormo, Scully here richly pairs the understated vocabulary and materiality of modernity with the chromatic refulgence of Mannerism.

These portraits of Oisín, with their collage-like arrangement of figural sections that nonetheless retain loose and brazen brushstrokes, lend themselves as one means of reducing the distance between such linguistic terms as figuration and abstraction, a task that had been implicitly undertaken since the very outset of the invention of Renaissance perspective itself, only to have become accelerated as of the breakthroughs of Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Picasso and Matisse, to name only a few of the major players upon the horizon of Western visual representation. With the presence of both reference and pure mark making, a particular painting of this Eleuthera series can be read through the semiological system as theorized by the eminent French art historian Hubert Damisch in his books A Theory of /Cloud/ and The Origin of Perspective. These two pivotal texts of Damisch address the highly influential Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective at the beginning of the fifteenth century. As a critique of the artificiality of his illusionistic painting of the Baptistery of Florence, Brunelleschi would incorporate two mirrors in his experiment, so as to correct the static condition inherent to painting. Damisch formulates this undertaking of Brunelleschi as a differential system that gives way to such oppositional pairs as painting versus mirror, painting versus reality, along with semblance versus abstraction, which he regards as contrary yet interdependent forms. Although both language and painting themselves function through systems of oppositional, dialectical parameters that respectively give rise to verbal and visual meaning, Damisch ultimately sets the operation of language apart from that of pictorial representation by stating that perspective “has its origin (or its departure) outside speech, outside the phonic element.”[5]

How can we therefore not see these phantasmal images of Scully that are currently on display at the Albertina Museum as manifestations of Brunelleschi’s own simultaneous espousal of and doubt in “scientific” perspective? The intermittent reservations we encounter in Leon Battista Alberti’s groundbreaking treatise On Painting, dedicated to Brunelleschi, come across as suggestions of geometric perspective’s own epistemological boundaries, such as when he states, “The great work is not a colossus, but a ‘historia’, for there is far more merit in a ‘historia’ than in a colossus.”[6] As Damisch would have Brunelleschi’s paradoxical model of perspective run parallel to that of language so as to set the structure of both text and image differential, albeit essentially distinct, the “thinking” he espouses also relies upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception that invites the observer to probe touch and observation in order to gain insight into visual perception, as exemplified through Cézanne’s modernist undertaking. For Cézanne, the tentative and temporal nature of visuality and its possible representation are formulated as ongoing experiments through observation, the construction of form and its dissolution—its formlessness.

Through semblances of photographic images of his son, Scully extends his singular aesthetic arc in order to present painting as a form of restless experimentation that is as boundless as the mind's eye, founded upon primordial intuition, yet simultaneously conditioned by the historical trajectory of painting. “Waiting, hesitating, repeatedly beginning anew—this characterizes Scully’s approach as well,” explains the distinguished art historian Werner Spies in the insightful essay of the exhibition catalogue, where he draws parallels between the inconclusive stance within the plays of Samuel Beckett and the artmaking of Scully.[7] Incidentally, the following was Beckett’s note found on the manuscript of his first play Eleuthéria that would remain dormant for four decades: “Prior to Godot. 1947. Unpublished. Jettisoned.” Up until Eleuthera, the figurative practice of Scully would itself be jettisoned for five decades—since the mid-sixties. 

The gestural vigor, along with the chromatic lavishness, within these paintings by Scully reaches one of its utmost heights in Eleuthera [O+L] (2017), although this time the depicted figure of Oisín uncannily suggests a kaleidoscopic representation of Scully’s wife Liliane Tomasko as well. A prolific artist, herself delved within so-called abstract painting that is in fact rooted in the phenomenons of everyday reality, Tomasko captures slices of the world through the medium of photography and translates the shifting, temporal conditions of vision into painting. In Eleuthera [O+L], the composition is no longer defined by the rounded platform that is present in many of Scully’s portrayals of Oisín. Instead, the configuration is dominated by ongoing exchanges between the nameable and unnameable, where avid brushmarks and partially geometric forms give way to one reading of the painting as a summation of Scully’s past and present production. As painterly gestures dominate the definition of the masklike face of the figure in shades of burnt orange, the emerald eyes here intriguingly echo the predominant background of the painting that is also articulated through fragments of such loosely defined geometric motifs as the elliptical form, bands and undulating stripes rendered through a plethora of vibrant colors. As if an inventory of Scully’s various routes of artmaking, Eleuthera [O+L] presents itself as an evident tribute to diverse perspectives of artistic practices.

In various ways, therefore, this exhibition of Scully comes across as a collaborative undertaking with the artist’s immediate, personal milieu and the broader landscape of visual culture. That landscape has now become a reinvention of the models set forth by Picasso and Matisse, among others, who leaned upon Cézanne’s doubt of the academic rules of visual representation that had in fact been continually mastered, challenged, problematized, rethought and reworked. If the terrain of modernist visuality seemed to have culminated in repressing visual representation and disconnecting it from the field of social history, these paintings of Scully reconnect visuality at once to sensation and the social fabric.

“I have little to tell you; one talks about painting more, in effect, and perhaps better, by being at the motif than by devising purely speculative theories, which often lead one astray,” wrote Cézanne in 1902.[8] This doubt of Cézanne in speculative theories, which would be reformulated by his disciples Matisse and Picasso, has now become reconfigured and is currently perceptible at the Albertina Museum, where the ineffable gestures and occasional drips of Scully participate in the transformation of photographic imagery into semblances of existence through an individual perspective that disrupts a teleological narrative of modernism, an art-historical model that had leaned toward setting figuration terminally apart from abstraction. Eleuthera is Sean Scully’s recent contribution in amending that narrative “in fractals of spirit and oil.”

Notes

1. Kelly Grovier, “Eleuthera,” in Sean Scully: Eleuthera, ed. Klaus Albrecht Schröder (Bielefeld and Berlin: Kerber Verlag, 2019), p. 143.

2. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 31.

3. Sean Scully, “I’m a Second Chance Person,” in conversation with Elisabeth Dutz, Sean Scully: Eleuthera, p. 66.

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 173–76.

5. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (1987), trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 447.

6. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435), trans. Martin Kemp (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 71. See also Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, pp. 446–47.

7. Werner Spies, “Anxiety and Resurrection,” in Sean Scully: Eleuthera, p. 46.

8. Paul Cézanne, excerpted from a letter written to Charles Camoin (January 28, 1902), in Cézanne, ed. Françoise Cachin et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996), p. 17.

Sean Scully is currently represented by Lisson Gallery in New York, Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Kewenig in Berlin and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (June 2019).

Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain

Following its presentation at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria, this exhibition of Sean Scully will travel to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Málaga, Spain, where it will be on view from October 15, 2019 through January 19, 2020.