SALZBURG.- The exhibition To Feel brings together oil paintings and watercolours from Sean Scully’s formative Wall of Light series. Begun in 1998, this series features vertical and horizontal blocks of colour that form pictorial architectures reminiscent of brickwork. Dark tones, which evoke compact wooden beams, alternate with contrasting, brighter colours, coalescing to form rhythmic units within the compositions.
The impetus for this series stems from a small watercolour that Scully painted in Mexico in 1984, in which he transcribed the interplay of warm sunlight and shadow on the stacked stones of ancient Mayan ruins and architectural formations on the Yucatn Peninsula. The artist was fascinated by their surfaces and how the stones seemed to reflect the passage of time. Over the years, Scully moved beyond Mexico, responding to other lights and latitudes, and his paintings reflect the places and seasons in which they were created. Scully, ‘a distinctly cosmopolitan artist,’ writes Antonia Hoerschelmann in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, ‘has engaged intensely with European art and cultural history.’
The materiality of his medium, rather than geometry, has become central to his way of working. Strong painterly influences include the psychological intensity of the seventeenth-century Spanish tradition or the expressive colour and surface of French Post-Impressionism. These points of reference inform not only his rich, complex palette but also his handling of paint. Scully’s colours bleed from one stripe onto the next, while the luminous grounds radiate through. The open, frayed edges of his colour blocks – partly opaque, partly transparent – attest to his admiration of the work of douard Vuillard.
Scully’s paintings have long had a distinctly physical, bodily presence. In a veritable maelstrom of paint, the colours become increasingly transparent and translucent, even iridescent in places. The relationship between surface textures and deep layers of colour appears to undergo a gradual transformation, as if the material state of the paintings were in fact changing. — Antonia Hoerschelmann
The paintings in the exhibition possess a distinctly physical, architectural quality – a defining characteristic of Scully’s work that is reflected in the title of the series, Wall of Light. He is, as Michael Auping has observed, ‘a builder of images’. Through variations in hue and brightness, his blocks of paint create a sense of weight, tension and motion. The thick layers of paint ‘push each other, but at the same time make room for each other’, as the artist has stated. Despite their apparent solidity, the pictorial walls emulate impressions of light, illuminating and permeating the colour bricks. ‘The wall is a barrier, but what I’m doing is dissolving it. It is metaphysical, transformative,’ explains Scully.
Scully’s large-scale works retain a delicate, almost intimate note, as shown in his monumental La Grande Mer (2024–26). The largest work in the exhibition, it spans over three metres in width and is dominated by the colour blue, which has particular resonance within his practice. Irregular broad brushstrokes in variegated blue tonalities evoke the image of dark depths or churning water and carry a subtle emotional weight. Dabs of red, shining through the cracks between the blue bricks animate the canvas. As Hoerschelmann writes, ‘the pull of the sea is like the pull of Scully’s paintings as they draw the viewer into the pictorial action.’
Scully condenses a wealth of influences in his practice, developing entirely new pictorial inventions in which emotion proves to be central to the work’s meaning.— Antonia Hoerschelmann
In contrast to the oceanic register of La Grande Mer (2024–26), the work Burnt Orange (2025) with its intense orange and red tones highlights Scully’s fascination with nocturnal light. The warm hues evoke embers gleaming through bricks, heightening the painting’s fiery energy.
Works on paper have occupied a central position within Scully’s practice throughout his career, functioning not as preparatory works but as a medium through which his pictorial language continues to evolve. He has described the process of painting with watercolours as ‘collaborating with sunlight’. Offering a sensitivity unattainable on a large scale, the two works on view extend and reconfigure the formal language of his paintings, in a compelling balance between the compositions’ architectural structure and the expressive potential of watercolour. Here, too, Scully develops a sense of depth, though he achieves it through entirely different means. Animated by the medium’s fluidity and transparency, the verdant works on paper offer a nuanced counterpoint to the large-scale paintings.
Born in Dublin, then raised in London, Scully studied at Croydon School of Art from 1965 as a mature student, and then Newcastle University from 1968, where he began experimenting with abstraction. During a trip to Morocco in 1969, he was strongly influenced by the rhythm and play of stripes in the clothes and carpets throughout the region. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, he permanently relocated to New York. From 1980, he made the first of several influential trips to Mexico. The experience had a decisive effect on him and prompted Scully’s commitment to shift the paradigm in abstraction from Minimalism to emotional abstraction in painting, abandoning the reduced vocabulary of the former in favour of a return to metaphor and spirituality in art.
