A composition of striking scale and immense rhythmic vitality, Sean Scully’s If from 1986 is an exceptional example of Scully’s earliest body of striped, multi-panel paintings. Rendered in lush hues of cherry red, creamy white, ochre, blues, and browns, and constructed of four abutting panels, If marvelously defies the two-dimensional picture plane, lifting color and shape out of the pictorial realm; when mounted upon the wall, If becomes itself a sculptural relief, exuding and vibrating with impressive physical energy, purity and formal elegance. Exhibiting three distinct striated patterns of horizontal and vertical stripes, If reveals Scully’s intuitive capacity to render fields of colors that sublimely fill the architectural space of the canvas through an emotional and highly unique visual language. The composition of If – with its varying hues of color and alternating horizontal and vertical passages – speaks to Scully’s own assertion that his “paintings talk of relationships. How bodies come together. How they touch. How they separate. How they live together, in harmony and disharmony” (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Duisburg, Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Constantinople Or The Sensual Concealed The Imagery of Sean Scully, 2009, p. 8).

The composition of If is anchored by alternating thick vertical bands of deep cherry red and creamy white, each lush block of color wondrously shifting seamlessly into the next and brilliantly exuding boundless light and depth. The central vertical stripes are counterbalanced by a panel of horizontal bands of ochre and aegen blue in the left register of the composition and again by a smaller panel in the upper right corner of the composition where swathes of brown paint are thickly applied against a powdery blue surface, leaving only thin stripes of blue that appear to seep into and out of the brown paint. The far-left panel protrudes outward, breaking the two dimensionality of the painted canvas and endowing the composition with a sculptural presence and dimensionality that is marvelously heightened by the heavy, tactile swathes of paint which themselves suggest volume and dimensionality within the confines of the picture plane. Everywhere, color seems to move into and out of each other whilst above all maintaining their own distinct zones of hue, revealing Scully’s fascination with Rothko's melancholic affinity between light and darkness and his tangible weaving of color to reveal the layers beneath the surface of the canvas.

Though an admirer of the simple, polished geometry of Minimalism championed by such artists as Donald Judd or Frank Stella – indeed, Scully’s earliest “tape-and-spray” works of the 1970s adhere to such minimalist formalism – by the mid-1980s Scully felt that Minimalism’s strict approach to color and its erasure of the artist’s hand were too sterile and inhibited paint’s capacity for expressiveness. Foregoing such preciousness, Scully instead embraces in paintings like If the gestural, physical capacity of color and poetic quality of paint: here, each stratified band of color marvelously bears the mark of its creator through subtle bleeds of color and tactile strokes of impasto. As expressed by Scully himself, “The whole point of painting is that it has the potential to be so humanistic, so expressive. To give that up is a tremendous mistake, because then what you are doing is imitating forms of technological expression that can be manifested more directly, more efficiently, and frankly, more beautifully, in their original form. It is the opposite of what I am trying to do. I want my brushstrokes to be full of feeling – material feeling manifested in form and color.” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, Hood Museum of Art Dartmouth College, Hanover 2008, p. 66)

Arguably more than any artist of his generation, Scully combines the formal traditions of European masters with a distinctly American abstract tradition, typified in particular by Mark Rothko. While Scully’s chromatic expression of color is bound to the post-Impressionist works of Pierre Bonnard and Paul Gauguin, whose preoccupation with ideas of opacity and translucency offer a poignant parallel to Scully’s own visual orchestration, and also to the European masters Caravaggio and Velazquez, whose brooding tones and ethereal understanding of light is echoed in Scully’s own abstract vernacular, it is within Mark Rothko’s impassioned approach to color and atmospheric understanding of light that Scully shares a special affinity. In Rothko's work, light combines with darkness in a moody, melancholic drama, that is the cornerstone of Scully's appreciation of his forefather. He says of his predecessor's work, "The sky and the sea, as well as all the experiences the artist has lived and all the stories he would like to tell are distilled into rectangles that have the solemnity of Stonehenge" (the artist cited in Michael Auping, 'No Longer a Wall' in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips collects ion, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, 2005-06, p. 24).

If brilliantly exhibits Scully’s mastery of moderating palette, light, and movement to its most basic forms without eliminating its energy, demonstrating not only the possibility of color in nonfigurative form but also revealing Scully’s spirited philosophy. As the very title of the painting suggests, Scully reduces representational elements to explore the very basis of that which comprises the earth we live upon, thus encouraging us to explore our place within the landscape and to reflect on all our experiences in relation to it.

Artist

Sean Scully