Without the boxiness of his previous work.

Without the boxiness of his previous work, Sean Scully's recently made known paintings are certainly less physically overbearing. Each large canvas contains a smaller, inset single in kind that evokes projections collapsed back onto their supports--as yet Scully wanted you to remain aware enough of their former invasiveness to give the paintings credit for holding back. With the single exception of a work appropriately titled R Way, 1992 Scully's palette here is an unusually reach forthed range of grays; two diptychs (Calling, 1992 and As Was, 1993) include knife elements that fit right into the tonal schema which is reminiscent of Jasper Johns

Johns' influence stands revealed all the more strongly given the comparative temperateness of Scully's modern paintings. Still, there's a literalist's John a unexpectedly Johns, a painterly Johns, and with equal reason on; the one who leads to Robert Morris or Bruce Nauman is a actual different artist from the united who leads to Frank Stella or Brice Marden. The John who point outs up in Scully's work is neither the fastidiously nostalgic ironist nor the Proustian ponderer any more than he is the recondite puzzler of iconographic puzzles. Scully's John is the classically formal Johns--the painter of flags and targets whose rhetorical mileage came from playing distant from formats that were flat (in the pair the physical and the emotional sense) against hypnotically evocative paint handling.

Of course a flag or a target can in no degree really be as neutral as all that--certainly not compared with the neutrality of the formats Scully employs: checkerboards, stripes, bars. Like Kenneth Noland, Scully has mov away from specifically referential motifs toward more abstract patterns whose analogues can be erect wherever a surface needs elaborating, from architecture to clothing. from the same token, Johns' brushwork was not at all really all that emotive, in comparison either to that of the Abstract Expressionists before him or to Scully's rugged and brawny paint application. Not that Scully's way of filling in his stripes and squares can fairly be called Expressionist either. His handling of paint exhibit tos affinities with that of any of the "new image" painters of the '70s--his closest American contemporaries--but where their roughnes was meant to summon Johnsian tentativeness, vulnerability, and doubt, his pretends to aim more at stoic self-dominion.

Upping the ante upon Johns' formula, Scully has invert its balance. The subject of Scully's paintings has les to do with emotion than with what used to be called "character." They speak of determination through brilliance, forthrightness above subtlety, domination rather than seduction--the ideals of a jock rather than those of a imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer Or maybe of a jock who writes verse for of course he wants you to admire his sensitivity too. Which would all be real well, if only the numbers were finer. What Scully's just discovered restraint reveals is that the old-fashioned assertiveness was its own reward, that despite a pleasurable formal solidity, the inwardness and sensibility riding onward Scully's charged brushwork are just too simple, too steady, and too familiar to be of shrewd interest.

...

Home