Sean Scully’s paintings – mute, stern and abstract – command your attention. In reproductions, the 71-year-old artist’s stripes and checkers look tight and controlled. But up close, you can see the passion fuelling the sweeping brushstrokes. They are utterly time dependent: the longer you look, the more that emerges, and on slightly trippy synaesthesic levels. The varying horizontal bands of colours feel like the changing chords of music, while the colours themselves start to take on smells. The deep reds have the coppery scent of blood; the greens, the earthiness of wet grass.
Hanging in the back room are a series of framed pages of handwritten notes and scribbled drawings. Statements such as ‘art is a wound in the dance of love’ attest to Scully’s old-school romanticism. A recollection of how stacking crates at Woolworths as a teenager inspired his sculptures is more down-to-earth. They provide interesting access into Scully’s mind, but offer little as outright works of art. The gallery describes them as ‘drawn-notes’ – presumably as they’re all up for sale and this gives them a bit more artistic cred.
Okay, that’s pretty cynical. And cynicism is one thing that Scully doesn’t do. He paints as if the past few decades of hip, self-aware, irony-drenched, shock-tactic art never happened. His work is unashamedly emotional and spiritual (last year, he completed a commission for a thousand-year-old monastery in Spain). These paintings feel a bit like analogue technology: sad relics of a bygone era. But they also invite us into doing something deeply uncool but deeply rewarding, which is concentrating on something that someone’s spent a long time making. Switch your phone off before you go.
@MattBreen3