106 NORMANDIE IMPRESSIONISTE
Nowhere does it seem more appropriate that the hard-edge geometry of minimalism should be brought alive with gestural strokes, the precision saved from the formulaic by the looseness of the painting, the many-layered shifting blocks reflecting both Scully’s own peripatetic background and his emotional relationship with belief. ‘Tere is a spiritual dimension to human beings that has to be nurtured, and I’m in that,’ he says when we met in Caen. Te dark under-painting always tempers the brightness of the finished result, the solidity of his blocks conveying foundations built on shifting sands: a post-modern, post- utopian style of abstraction. Tat morose
observation of Milton’s about the topography of hell comes to mind: ‘And in the lowest depth, a lower depth.’ What is beneath matters just as much as what is on the surface. Tat sense of darkness beneath gives each block, stripe and slab of colour a brooding stability. However a colourist, like Scully, has an uncanny ability to evoke the conditions of light with a luminosity of paint in the crevices between those slabs and stripes. He thinks in layers, he works in layers, he celebrates the edge: that’s where the magic exists. A painting is so much more than its subject – you cannot pin a painting down by naming the artist’s favourite motif. Tis is not just about
stripes. Tese are stripes like no one else’s. Known for bringing back emotion into structural abstraction after the fall of minimalism, Scully may at times seem fixated on stripes, but look again: the variety is more than merely compelling. With Scully we have learned to expect the unexpected. A minimalist in expressive clothing, he takes the formal grid to create banked up walls of emotion, blocks of layered colour that come alive when you confront them face to face. Teir formality drains away, that painterly slippage achieving a Doric calm. Teir monumentality within this space achieves something unusual. Tey break down the
Left Family images from Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas visited by Scully that gave the impetus to a series of figurative paintings first unveiled in 2017
Right Round Sleeper Stack Opulent Ascension North, and The 12
It was 40 years ago when Scully was quoted as saying ‘the art that interests me is heroic art’. Well, here, the work is nothing if not heroic
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