"Some artists are inventors, some are builders," Brian Kennedy, the director of the Hood Museum, said in a tour of the gallery. "Scully is more on the builder side."
Though Scully's work is highly conceptual, this notion of "building" is indeed apparent. Layers and layers of paint are visibly applied to achieve his luminous effect.
"Holly," a new series on view for the first time, debuts smaller scale compositions than Scully's usual size (wall-encompassing canvases have been done and overdone by abstract painters across the country, as Scully is undoubtedly aware). The new series, which references the Stations of the Cross and is an homage to his mother (who is named Ivy, though, not Holly) is Scully's most impressive work to date. The paintings entice; their lacquered surfaces shine; while the idea of light is visible through the earth-toned blocks.
Scully's signature Rothko-esque canvases are rough hewn and large scale; they do feel like walls, but less like light. Several of these impressive paintings dominate the entire second floor of the museum. The exhibit makes excellent use of the Hood's space to display these pieces in their varying sizes.
Instead of tacking titles and information for each painting onto the wall, the viewer is forced to carry a pamphlet with Scully's explanation of each piece. Kennedy says he's trying to counteract the "sniff the label" syndrome by excluding the titles, but the hand-holding of Scully's interpretations is even more intrusive to the audience's experience.
Scully's rhetoric can be a bit intrusive in general, actually. In no way does Scully fit the stereotype of the reclusive artist: he keeps studios in three cities (New York City, Barcelona, and one near Munich) and is certainly one of the most articulate abstractionists around. His language is deftly self-promotional, bordering on self-mythologizing.
In a video on display at the Hood, Scully converses on the ways in which Native American culture uses "repetition" to create "mysticism" and how, in classic art-jargon, he wants to "explode" that repetition. He then launches into the well-known tale of the day on the beach when he first conceived of his epic "Wall of Light" series. It is quite possible that a review has yet been written about Scully without mention of that particular media tidbit.
Scully's style of painting, though, is undeniably excellent. The rich brush strokes and layers of paint harken back to Hans Hoffman's "push-pull" technique; it seems Scully himself now borders on Abstract Expressionism. His work from "Wall of Light" to the present is emotive and poignant, especially when his large strokes are confined to the small canvases of "Holly."
Scully's not an "expressionist," he's a "compressionist," according to Brian Kennedy. Scully works in a style akin to an action painter, but with more gravity. Still, the accentuated imperfections in his later work are truly moving.
It's inherently more human to see brush strokes instead of the lines where masking-tape has been pulled away, as if Scully himself isn't sure what he's building when starting a painting. Scully's heightened-awareness process makes his work more relatable.
Underlying the exhibit is the Hood's focus on the importance of "the stripe" to Scully's work, which seems odd and out of place. Applying Scully to "the history of the stripe in western civilization" is a bit of a stretch. Scully works mostly with blocks, or "bricks of light," not stripes. Artists like Agnes Martin or Frank Stella would offer more insight to the stripe as a sign of Modernism.
It's interesting to consider how tension between horizontal and vertical stripes can represent human relationships. "Precious" is one painting that can benefit from this interpretation. Still, the current exhibit would be billed more appropriately as a retrospective devoted purely to Sean Scully's worthy body of work.
"Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe"" will be on display in the Hood until Mar. 9.
