Sean Scully Lot n° 35

Sean Scully Aruba 1998 Oil on canvas on wood 122 x 109 cm. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse of the wood 'ARUBA Sean Scully '98 ARUBA' and directional arrows. - With studio marks. Sean Scully online catalogue raisonné, WVZ no. SSp98 02 Provenance Galerie Jamileh Weber, Zurich (with label on the reverse) (1988); private collection, Switzerland Literature Demetrio Paparoni, Arthur C. Danto, Arte e poststoria, Conversazioni sulla Fine dell'Estetica e Altro, Venice 2020, o.p. Kelly Grovier (ed.), Sean Scully, Bricklayer of the soul, Reflections in celebration, Ostfildern 2015, p. 120 with color illus. In 1997 and 1998, Sean Scully produced a loose sequence of paintings that he named after Caribbean islands, including "Bonaire," "Curacao," "Anguilla," and others, in addition to the "Aruba" offered here. The choice of the picture titles remains puzzling, as they have no discernible connection with the abstract depictions. Tonal works in restrained colouring occupy an important place in Scully's pictorial oeuvre. "Aruba", with its mixed shades of black, grey, beige and grey, exemplifies this colour palette. The horizontally and vertically contrasting sequences of stripes lend the painting a superficial austerity and straightforwardness, but a closer look reveals a multi-layered vitality. The painting technique is characterized by a certain irregularity; vibrating lines drawn by hand and diffuse contours soften and enliven the severity of the picture's structure. The impasto paint, applied in multiple layers, nevertheless allows the deeper layers of paint to shine through in part and conjures up a pictorial world hidden beneath the surface. Two so-called insets, which contain the narrower sequences of stripes, visually and physically break up the actual pictorial space. Insets, which Scully has been working with since the 1980s, are small, separately mounted and painted canvases that are implanted into the larger work. Unlike painted color fields, they allow for sharp-edged delineations within works otherwise executed with irregular paint application and diffuse iridescent contours. As a kind of interlocking diptych or triptych, they create pictorial harmonies or conflicts, whereby the newly created contexts clearly transcend the expressiveness of the individual parts.