Sean Scully, Entre Ciel et Terre @Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

I had seen this exhibition in its online version on Thaddaeus Ropac's website during the confinement. Alas nothing about the online version could have prepared me for the experience of being in the presence of these magisterial paintings. The works in the main gallery are huge, filled with energy, but quietly understated, drawing us into their reflective world. The paint is luscious, at times thick and sinewy, at others thin and transparent. It seems as though each band is applied differently to create various effects across each work. This sense of repetition is continually established across the exhibition only to be withdrawn upon reflection

Sean Scully, Entre Ciel et Terre
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Each of the five paintings in the main gallery is a huge steel-supported stack of horizontal bands. The paint races across the metal surfaces with a feeling of urgency and intensity, a combination not often seen in contemporary abstract painting. The constantly moving paint flows, weaving strokes as if we are watching the brush dance across steel, rarely pausing for breath. The movement of paint across steel makes for restless, sometimes even agitated scapes of colour, turning from green to brown, catching some orange and blue on the way to make a rainbow that, together with the steel underneath sees them shine and sparkle. 

Detail

The panels in the main gallery are doubled, communicating in pairs created in the same palette, even when the colours are varied on either side of the centre. Up close we note that a multitude of colours have been used to make up the range, even when it looked from a distance to be limited. A strip of steel is left bare on the left hand side and in the middle of each. Scully explains in the online video that he deliberately left these spaces bare so that each work would resemble a book with a gutter. 

Sean Scully, Black Window Pale Land, 2020

Two smaller works are hung in the gallery's portico space. Both are on a copper coloured metal. One is black, white, grey, the bands not touching and the steel underneath shining through. It is as though each band has been very hastily applied, using a few short strokes.The merging of the industrial metal and the paint is like a coming together of different worlds. In those works where the steel support becomes a visible part of the painting, I was reminded of the title of the exhibition: Between Heaven and Earth. The bringing together of different worlds is a feature of the exhibition: beyond colour and steel, the industrial and the natural merge in works that resonate with seascapes and landscapes, and as is always the case with Scully's work, the geometrical patterns of the natural world. On some of them the paint is calm, like waves and on others there are storms tossing the ocean. On still others, a square in the middle of the painting makes them resemble windows, even when nothing can be seen on the other side.

Sean Scully, Landline Star, 2017

If the bigger ones are reminiscent of landscapes, the smaller ones are like puzzles in which no two bands of colour are the same. Again, this changes up close where we see that the colours don't meet, and drips interrupt the rational organization of colour bands. Up close, the rhythm and energy changes to a force field of moving colours.Scully talks about being at the intersection of European and American abstraction. The catalogue likens them to the work of Cezanne and Scully himself has talked of the influence of Van Gogh's bedroom chair. Equally, abstract expressionism, minimalism, the American painting's turn inwards to refer only to what lies within its own frame is everywhere identifiable Between Heaven and Earth.

Sean Scully, Star, 2021

The question I often ask of Scully's painting is "Why is he not doing the same thing over and over again?" After all, he has been painting bands of colour in different shapes and sizes, made into stripes, stacks and building blocks for over fifty years. But, of course, every series explores different colours, materials, sizes and arrangements on the support. In Between Heaven and Earth, the colour schemes, application of paint, the relationship of thick oil paint and the metal support changes everything. Like the natural world to which they speak, even if he changes a single element, these paintings are in constant motion.