Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: geometric abstraction is not dead; it’s still breathing, and Sean Scully (born in 1945 in Dublin) is living proof. Here’s an artist who has made museum walls tremble with his horizontal and vertical stripes for over fifty years, while some still stubbornly believe contemporary art is limited to NFTs and Milo Moiré’s egg-laying performances.
Let me tell you a story: the story of an Irish kid who landed in London, grew up in absolute poverty, slept in dingy rooms, and worked as a typesetter. A boy who spent his lunch breaks at the Tate Gallery staring at Van Gogh’s Chair, while his colleagues devoured their sandwiches at the pub. A kid who, at 17, took evening classes at the Central School of Art while working by day as a graphic designer and messenger.
Do you know those Saint-Louis neighborhood residents in Versailles who still confuse Kandinsky and Rothko? Well, Scully gives them a masterclass in what contemporary abstraction really is. He doesn’t paint to decorate their Louis XVI salons or Empire-style bedrooms. No, he creates works that are like visual uppercuts, compositions that grab you by the guts and force you to look painting straight in the eye.
Let’s first talk about his relationship with geometry, his initial artistic obsession. In the 1970s, Scully began by creating complex grids, interweaving lines that made the retina vibrate like an op-art painting on acid. But make no mistake, this isn’t Vasarely for tourists. These early works are already loaded with palpable tension, as if the grid itself were about to explode under the pressure of its own rigidity.
Then came the big turning point. In 1969, during a trip to Morocco, he discovered the geometric patterns of traditional textiles. This encounter was like a mystical revelation for a convinced atheist. The colorful stripes of Berber tents became his new aesthetic bible. He realized then that geometry was not just a formal prison but could be a powerful emotional language.
But it was in New York, where he moved in 1975, that Scully truly started to shake up the world of contemporary art. He arrived in a city where minimalism reigned supreme, where artists strove to create works as cold as industrial freezers. And what does our Irishman do? He decides to mess up this beautiful order. He starts painting his famous “Black Paintings”, monochrome canvases traversed by horizontal stripes that seem to absorb light like black holes.
I can already hear the purists screaming sacrilege: “But it’s reheated Ad Reinhardt!” Wrong, my dear friends. Where Reinhardt sought transcendence in absolute black, Scully explores the depths of the human soul. His black stripes aren’t stylistic exercises but emotional seismographs recording the tremors of existence.
1981 marked a decisive turning point with “Backs and Fronts”, a monumental work that caused a sensation in the New York art world. Imagine this: fourteen aligned panels, each covered with horizontal and vertical stripes, like a musical score written by a mad composer. This work is a masterful kick in the anthill of minimalism. It proves that geometric abstraction can be as expressive as Pollock and as visceral as De Kooning.
But Scully’s real revolution lies in his painting technique. He doesn’t just draw straight lines with masking tape like a first-year art student. No, he paints his stripes freehand, letting the brush tremble slightly, creating blurry boundaries between colors. It’s as if Mondrian suddenly decided to paint after three glasses of Irish whiskey.
Over the decades, his palette has deepened like fine wine. The metallic grays of his early days gave way to deep ochres, maritime blues, and dried-blood reds. Each stripe of color is constructed like an emotional sandwich, with successive layers of pigment creating hallucinatory depth. It’s painting that makes your mouth water like gourmet cuisine.
Take “Wall of Light Desert Night” from 1999. This canvas is like an open window into the artist’s soul. The blocks of color stack like bricks, but each brick is alive, pulsating. The light seems to emanate from within the canvas, as if Scully had managed to capture the very essence of desert twilight. It’s Mark Rothko meets Frank Lloyd Wright in a Dublin bar.
And don’t get me started on his “Landline” series, begun in 1999. These horizontal stripes stretching like infinite horizons prove that abstraction can be as lyrical as a Rimbaud poem. Scully achieved the impossible: he transformed geometry into an emotional landscape. It’s like Caspar David Friedrich decided to paint his sublime landscapes in abstract mode.
Now let’s talk about his relationship with architecture, his second obsession. In 2015, he restored the Santa Cecilia church in Montserrat, Spain, creating a fascinating dialogue between medieval sacred art and contemporary abstraction. He doesn’t just hang his paintings on the walls; he transforms the entire space into a total work of art. It’s as if Claire Tabouret were given carte blanche to create new stained glass for Notre-Dame de Paris (that’s an easy one).
The frescoes he created for this church are a brilliant rebuke to those who think abstract art is incompatible with spirituality. His color stripes converse with the Romanesque vaults as if they had always been there. It’s a live art history lesson: abstraction isn’t a break from tradition but its continuation by other means.
And then there’s the way he works with material. Scully paints like a mason building a wall, stacking layers of color like bricks of pigment. He uses brushes as wide as brooms, applying paint in broad gestures that reveal the physical effort. It’s painting that smells of sweat and linseed oil, not the artificial perfume of Parisian vernissages.
Look at “Landline Far” from 2020. The horizontal stripes seem to vibrate like guitar strings stretched to the limit. The deep blue at the top converses with the stormy gray at the bottom, creating a tension that grabs you by the throat. It’s as if Scully had managed to paint the sound of the blues, the music he listened to in London pubs when he was young.
His painting is physical, muscular, but never brutal. It’s like a boxer who has perfectly mastered the art of combat: every blow is calculated, but the whole retains stunning grace. His canvases are rings where reason and emotion, geometry and chaos, structure and freedom clash.
And don’t think Scully has rested on his laurels. At nearly 80 years old, he continues to experiment and push the limits of his art. His recent sculptures in Corten steel are like paintings that decided to step off the wall and invade space. “Crate of Air” (2018) is a monumental meditation on emptiness and fullness, as imposing as a Mesopotamian ziggurat.
His recent “Dark Windows” series is a direct response to our troubled times. These dark windows, composed of vertical and horizontal stripes, reflect our confined world. But even in these darker works, there’s always a glimmer of hope, a crack where light manages to seep through.
Geometric abstraction is not yet a dead language. Scully proves that the simplest forms — the straight line, the rectangle, the square — can still carry devastating emotional weight. He’s an artist who understands that geometry isn’t just about rulers and compasses but also about heart and guts.
And for those who still think abstract art is an intellectual scam, I say: go see a Scully exhibition. Stand in front of one of his canvases for more than ten seconds (if you can). Let yourself be hypnotized by those vibrating stripes of color. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll finally understand that abstraction isn’t an escape from reality but a deeper way of facing it.
Scully is the last of the Mohicans, a painter who still believes in the power of painting to move us, transform us. He continues to believe in the power of material, color, gesture. He’s living proof that abstraction isn’t dead, that it will never die as long as there are artists brave enough to confront the blank canvas with sincerity and passion.
So yes, some will say Scully has been repeating the same thing for fifty years. But that’s exactly what critics said about Morandi and his still lifes, Rothko and his floating rectangles, Giorgio Morandi and his bottles. The truth is, Scully, like all great artists, has found his territory and has never stopped exploring it deeply, delving ever further into the infinite possibilities of his pictorial language.
Art history will remember Sean Scully as the one who saved geometric abstraction from its own rigidity, who gave it back a soul, a breath, a humanity. In a time when contemporary art often loses itself in hollow concepts and passing trends, he remains a beacon, a reminder that painting can still be an act of faith, love, and resistance.
And if you’re still not convinced, well, go back to your posh vernissages in your all-white galleries. Meanwhile, Sean Scully will keep painting his stripes of color, building his personal cathedral of abstraction brick by brick, indifferent to fashion and trends, faithful only to his vision and his unwavering faith in the power of painting.
Because in the end, that’s perhaps Scully’s greatest tour de force: transforming geometry, that seemingly cold and impersonal language, into visual poetry capable of touching us deeply. His paintings remind us that art can still be a physical, emotional, and spiritual experience. It’s a message we need now more than ever.
