Abstract Trash

Sean Scully is not a very nice person. But who cares, it's what he paints that counts. We're not going to demonise him like Céline or Polanski on the pretext that he lacks humility to the point of indecency. In addition to compiling in one human being all the clichés of the inspired artist who paints his picture in one go. If this is the ultimate artistic criterion, then it is not certain that Kandinsky is an artist. CQFD ?

Of course, throughout the interview, we are also entitled to the "druidic" expression of a primary love of matter and a fuzzy intellectualisation of pigment. All the usual nonsense that allows usurpers to tell you, a layperson, that if you don't feel the secret vibration of the brush's hairs, you understand nothing about art. Scully doesn't 'analyse'. He feels. Good?

The climax of these hermetic confidences of an insider: a scoop. Scully shares his immoderate and quasi-mystical passion for yellow Van Gogh with Anselm Kiefer himself! Don't waste any more time. But when the gentleman goes so far as to state himself what he considers to be his distinctive talent as an artist, it's like a dream.

Scully's unique talent? A sense of colour. He says it himself: he knows how to "marry them to infinity". And Rothko? Matisse? Delaunay? To take the first names that come to mind under the heading Colours = Painting. But Scully should not make much of Mondrian or Vasarelly either. His harmonies work, his masses vibrate. But nothing more. And yet, there is something real about his paintings. Scully is careful to always leave them with a "rather rough, almost raw finish". Without theorising about it.

In fact, Sean Scully's art lies precisely in the encounter between conventional abstract painting and this unexpected trashy rendering. Mastered, this wild energy melts into this geometry of colours like circles forced into squares. Unique. But don't tell him that.

Photo: Sean Scully: Landline Crimson - 2020