The Brooklyn Rail

One positive outcome from the distraction of art fairs has been that more artists and their dealers are working together to make gallery solo exhibitions that juxtapose new work with early work. When done with sensitivity and a good eye, these presentations often become far greater than the sum of their parts, an achievement rarely achieved in stalls that bring to mind a county fair. And when an exhibition provides the bonus of rebuilding a historical connection to its actual location, as does this focused yet sweeping exhibition of ten works by Sean Scully (nine paintings and one sculpture installed outdoors), its use-value rises.

Sean Scully’s paintings have, on several occasions, been exhibited in Los Angeles before. What makes this Lisson exhibition unique is that, in the case of three included paintings (one from 1971, two from 1974), it provides a kind of homecoming, given that they were first shown in 1975 at a gallery with a fantastic name, La Tortue in Santa Monica (just after Scully’s arrival in the United States in Los Angeles; he would move to New York soon after the opening of the Santa Monica exhibition.) These paintings, now roughly fifty years old, are part of what Scully called the “Supergrid” series that he began while a student in the UK during the 1960s. The three canvases take full advantage of the formal visual language of their time, as well as the practical advantages of acrylic paint: fast drying and accommodating of the tape used to make a clean, straight edge. The earliest painting, Blaze (1971), is a highly regulated riot of intersecting horizontal and diagonal bright stripes (they lean to the right, delivering to the painting an overall visual thrust) that exist on top of more painterly vertical and diagonal stripes. The painting’s clear juxtaposition of front-and-just-behind demonstrates how much action can be generated in the narrowest of depths, as the lines that are behind are not only broken into rhythmic segments, they are also painted in a manner best called atmospheric. This effect is further developed in the two paintings from 1974—Final Grey 1/2 and Second Order 1/2—in which, with the advantage of the direct hindsight this exhibition gives us, it is clear the seeds of Scully’s subsequent paintings were planted.

Before turning to the recent work, it’s worthwhile to note, as Peter Frank does in his informed and informative essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, that these early paintings of Scully’s fit perfectly well with the ways in which numerous Los Angeles painters were dealing with the grid in the wake of such things as the Finish Fetish and/or Light and Space artists: “The rhythmic, colorful, yet allover, compositionally neutral paintings Scully presented to LA found themselves at home.” One can hope that one of these works will stay here in a museum.

At the press preview, Scully mentioned that someone remarked (and I’m paraphrasing) that he had just decided to turn the imagery of his work around to show what was behind in front and vice versa. It’s a far-from-wrong observation, but what strikes me most about the time and the perception of the actual and imagined space between his work of the 1970s and now is the extent to which his work seems effortlessly to blur the lines between many of the claimed absolutes usually held in opposition. Yes, it is not inaccurate to call Scully’s latest paintings abstract given the geometry of their structures and the organization of their components. It is far less common to consider formalism alongside the painterly, a combination that Scully uses to give his work qualities that, while still abstract, convey the representational complexities embedded in nature and our (human) connections to them. (It should be noted that Scully recently has been making paintings that are portraits.) To my eye, a large work like Wall Landline Triptych (2022) not only has his well-grounded structural feature of using part of a painting as a frame for another painting inset flush into its surface (figure/ground, like the horizon, is with us to stay) but also asserts the never-ending value of relationships that reinforce their perpetual renegotiation, shifting, then doubling, or tripling, or beyond, reaching for the level of interconnectedness quantum physicists are exploring today. To that end, one painting, Dark In (2023), shown in a room with the two paintings from 1974, wove the entire exhibition together, suggesting in the broad stripes and inset blocks of its countenance that whether or not things are front to back, or back and forth, separation remains ever impossible.