WALLS and FIELDS: Sean Scully's Wall of light desert day 2003
Shaune A Lakin

	Sean Scully Wall of light desert day 2003 oil on linen Purchased 2004 in honour of Brian Kennedy, Director of the National Gallery of Australia 1997–2004, with funds from Members of the National Gallery of Australia Council and Foundation

Sean Scully’s rigorous interrogation of the stripe became ever more pronounced throughout the 1990s. In his continuing Wall of Light series, the stripe is both the subject and the architectural device of the paintings, equally form and content. But the stripe, especially as it is utilised in the Wall of Light series, is a deeply ambivalent device. It attempts to picture the seriality and repetitiousness of contemporary life, in an act that might be understood as part of a realist tradition of transcription. But in producing such an image of the contemporary world, where ‘things are arranged in rows and lines … [where] everything is repeated’, the artist attempts to locate a phenomenal space that transcends this prevailing order.¹

The genesis of the Wall of Light series occurred in 1983, when Scully was in Mexico observing the ancient architectural ruins of the remote Yucatan area.² He became interested in the effects of light hitting the area’s crumbling dry-stone surfaces and subsequently produced a watercolour, Wall of light 4.84 1984. This small painting represented a significant formal departure for the artist: squares of vertical or horizontal bars were placed across the image in the manner of a patchwork quilt, or a dry-stone wall. Scully returned to and consolidated the Wall of Light motif in 1998, when he began to concentrate on architecturally-scaled oil paintings that present the viewer with a grid of differently-coloured bars and stripes. A complex system of over-painting gives to each bar a compelling tonal and chromatic intensity and ambiguous edges, an ambiguity that is at odds with the highly structured, grid-like composition.

The exhibition Sean Scully: Body of light includes key examples from the Wall of Light series. Among these is Wall of light desert day 2003, a large diptych that has recently come into the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Wall of light desert day has a companion piece in the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Wall of light desert night 1999.³

As their titles suggest, the works are related to Scully’s experience of the desert landscape. In November 1999, the painter was invited to attend a boxing match between Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis at the Thomas & Mack Center in the desert-city of Las Vegas, Nevada.⁴ Scully had never visited Las Vegas before and the commercialism, soullessness and distorted scale of the city (its ‘plastic Egypt’ and its ‘cardboard Camelot’) appalled him.⁵ Respite came when he visited the Valley of Fire State Park in the Mojave Desert, about eighty kilometres northeast of Las Vegas. The valley is famous for its red sandstone formations, petrified dunes and sheer cliffs. The sandstone takes on multi-shaded red and golden-yellow colourations throughout the day and evening that contrast against the low, scrubby green bushes that dot the landscape and the intense blue sky of the American West. Many of the valley’s sandstone surfaces are covered in dark, at times black creosote, formed when minerals leak out of the stone under the extreme desert heat. Some of these creosote-covered walls are inscribed with ancient petroglyphs that reveal rich red hues beneath the dark varnish.

Wall of light desert night was painted soon after, and in direct response to Scully’s experience of the Valley of Fire State Park. The painting’s predominantly blue, grey and Naples yellow palette suggests the effects of moonlight and shadows across the rocky desert landscape — an effect that, to the artist, seemed to refer to (or, better, render three dimensional) his own work:

There I saw extraordinary colour. Every shadow cast down onto the desert floor from the rocks was made of sand and dust and light. It was like looking at a sculpture of my pastels.⁶

	Sean Scully Small Barcelona painting 2002 oil on linen Galerie Lelong, Paris

Painted four years later, Wall of light desert day — with its juxtapositions of earthy reds and yellows against greens, blues and blacks — also provides a clear sense of the chroma and tonalities for which the Valley of Fire is famous.

Wall of light desert night and Wall of light desert day are each made of conjoined, identically-sized canvases. This surface is covered with a configuration (a ‘wall’) of squares and rectangles that are constructed of Scully’s signature, coloured stripes or bars — he refers to these coloured bars as ‘bricks’.⁷ The paintings are more or less mirror images of each other, except for their palettes and two small areas on Wall of light desert day where three ‘bricks’ are used instead of two. The coloured ‘bricks’ are ordered in an architectural manner and refer to the crumbling dry-stone walls Scully saw in the Yucatan in the early 1980s. They also reference the dry-stone walls found on Ireland’s western peripheries that, since the mid-1990s, have become a prominent subject of Scully’s photographic work.

Like the surfaces of dry-stone walls, the composition of Wall of light desert day appears disordered. But as with stone walls, and like all of Scully’s canvases, there is a meticulous logic to the composition of the painting. The composition is built around a rectangle that dominates the lower right hand section of the painting. This foundational rectangle is itself made of three columns (a common motif throughout Scully’s oeuvre) each comprising two sets of squares and rectangles. Running along the upper edge of the composition is a band of four squares and rectangles, with the remaining area — to the left of the foundational square and below the secondary row above it — made of two squares of coloured stripes or bars. We can see this structural logic in operation in a number of other paintings included in this exhibition. Small Barcelona painting 1.29.99 1999, Small Barcelona grey wall of light 2000, Mooseurach 2002, Red Merida 2002, Wall of light Arran 2002 and Yellow bar 2002 all contain it, although in each case the ‘secondary row’ runs alongside the foundational square and contains two or three squares of ‘bricks’ rather than four.

	Sean Scully Small Barcelona grey wall of light 2002 oil on linen Private Collection

The structural logic of Scully’s paintings is fundamental to his ambition to produce work that acknowledges and includes difference. His regulated, highly structured paintings set out to reduce the visual field to its most basic set of terms. They do this not to suggest that at some essential level we, as his spectators, are all the same, but to incorporate our difference. As Scully states it:

I’m using extremely simple forms that I see running through the basic human ordering systems … I see these simple forms as what unites us and what runs beneath the cultural superstructures that have caused us to be estranged.⁸

The most disturbing of these ‘cultural superstructures’ for Scully is language, whose effects — rendering speakers the ‘same’, fragmented and alienated, displaced and disembodied — mirror those of the artist’s experience of Las Vegas.⁹ Compellingly, the structure of Scully’s paintings also reflects the structural logic of language itself. But the coherence of the structure of the paintings becomes at particular points uncertain. This is especially so at those moments of slippage where the structure is pierced by traces of underpainting, and where roughly-stated edges are entirely ambiguous.

Sean Scully Mooseurach 2002 oil on canvas Galerie Lelong, Paris

In differentiating its compositional space according to a strictly applied, but always disturbed, geometrical logic (that is evident in many other Wall of Light works: thus they ‘all look the same’), Wall of light desert day plays with ideas and expectations of symmetry and asymmetry, the original and the copy, order and disorder, construction and decay. This concern with unresolved oppositions is announced in the title of the painting. ‘Wall’, with its suggestion of mass, architecture and containment, rubs up against the term ‘light’, with its suggestion of the ephemeral, the intangible and the abstract. While the painting is compositionally meticulously resolved, it refuses to be harmonious, since, as Scully has argued, harmony breeds complacency.

Harmony is coming out of what you know. It’s affirming what you already know. And as Einstein said: ‘when I know something, I don’t have to think about it.’ So disharmony is much more interesting and life affirming than harmony, because disharmony eventually, through history, we change into harmony.¹⁰

The palette of Wall of light desert day is equally tied to Scully’s critical repudiation of formal harmony. It is dominated by a very warm red oxide and a chromatically prominent yellow-orange, which are posed against ‘bricks’ of cool blue and green. This palette is, of course, indexical of a particular geographical space:

The colour is extremely important. I think of it as desert colour. And the title Wall of light desert day is significant because the idea of the desert is to me like the notion of a sacred land, a land that hasn’t been defiled. The other interesting thing about Wall of light desert day is that it has colours in it like Ayers Rock (Uluru). This strange kind of dead-red oxide colour, like a sandy red colour, I use quite a lot.¹¹

	Sean Scully Red Merida 2002 oil on canvas Private Collection

In its concern with landscape, especially the landscapes of expansive continental interiors, Wall of light desert day corresponds with Scully’s painting Bigland 1987–88. But the more recent painting’s concern with landscape is complex; any direct reference to place itself is rendered uncertain. Scully draws on a series of equally harsh, archetypal landscapes that are both real (the desert landscape of the continental USA; the barren, rocky edges of Ireland’s west coast; Mexico’s ancient Yucatan region) and imagined (both the idea of the red centre of Australia, which the artist has yet to see, and the Ireland of Scully’s memory and imagination). As with its composition, the spaces suggested by the painting are ambiguous in so far as they are simultaneously actual and imagined. That is, while the painting is based on Scully’s experience of an actual landscape (and might thus be understood as figurative, as part of a realist tradition of landscape painting), it is in no way bound to or limited by that experience. This is tied to the painter’s effort to produce works that enable and empower the viewer, rather than simply describe or transcribe his own experience of the world. As Scully has argued:

What I’m trying to do is something about modern life … I want to express that we live in a world with repetitive rhythms and that things are existing side by side that seem incongruous or difficult. Yet, out of that, is our truth. It expresses where we are. I think the beauty that we have now has more to do with the relationships that we make, than it has to do with the way we make things … It’s the relationship between things that expresses our truth, expresses some kind of spirituality that we have, or the possibility of this. And it’s the way that these modern relationships are reflected in the paintings that makes me, I think, into a kind of realist. So they are in a way kind of realism, but it’s a romantic realism.¹²

Sean Scully Wall of light Arran 2002 oil on canvas Private Collection

Wall of light desert day 2003 provides a distillation of the central concerns of Scully’s project in a number of crucial ways. Most significantly, the painting refuses any predetermined narrative or effect. For Scully, a painting must actively engage its viewer in an exchange that is free of any particular meaning, one that makes itself freely available to its entire audience.¹³ While the title of Wall of light desert day 2003 suggests a relationship to the real world (through its reference to a place and time, and the sensations suggested by that place and time), it is self-contained and, in its play on oppositions of weight and light, light and dark and form and dematerialisation, denies narrative readings. As David Carrier has suggested of the Wall of Light paintings more broadly: ‘There is no visual hierarchy because every element is equal to every other’, in a way that relates the paintings to Piet Mondrian’s notion of dynamic equilibrium and to the all-overness of Abstract Expressionism. Carrier characterises this equilibrium as a form of ‘monastic unity’¹⁴ — a space of phenomenon and difference. As such, Wall of light desert day brings home Scully’s intention to produce work that incorporates each and every viewer into its spiritual field.

With sincere thanks to Mark Henshaw.

¹ Sean Scully, interview with R Eric Davis Journal of Contemporary Art 1999 online version, http://www.jca-online.com/scully.html, downloaded 18 April 2004.
² See Michael Auping ‘No longer a wall’ Sean Scully: Wall of light (exhibition catalogue) Monterrey (Mexico): Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey 2001–02 pp.25–41 (esp. pp.26–27).
³ See David Carrier Sean Scully London: Thames and Hudson 2004 p.196.
⁴ Sean Scully, telephone conversation with Dr Brian Kennedy 21 May 2004.
⁵ Sean Scully, letter to the author 1 June 2004 National Gallery of Australia file 03/0511 folio 148.
⁶ Sean Scully, cited in Carrier Sean Scully 2004 p.196.
⁷ Sean Scully, cited in Auping ‘No longer a wall’ 2001–02 p.29.
⁸ Sean Scully, interview with Kevin Power, in Carrier Sean Scully 2004 pp.209–214 (p.213).
⁹ On language, see Scully, interview with Power, in Carrier Sean Scully 2004 p.211.
¹⁰ Sean Scully, interview with Hans-Michael Herzog ‘The beauty of the real’ Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue) Milan: Charta, 1996 pp.55–131 (p.79).
¹¹ Sean Scully, interview with Jörg Zutter in Pauline Green (ed) Sean Scully: Body of light (exhibition catalogue) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2004 pp. 17–23 (p. 21).
¹² Scully, interview with Herzog ‘The beauty of the real’ 1996 p.103.
¹³ ‘Abstract art has the possibility of being incredibly generous, really out there for everybody. It’s a nondenominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art of our time.’ Sean Scully, cited in Judith Higgins ‘Sean Scully and the metamorphosis of the stripe’ Artnews vol.84 no.9 November 1985 pp.104–113 (p.106).
¹⁴ Carrier Sean Scully 2004 p.193.