“Inspired by his personal memories, the ‘Landline’ paintings demonstrate how the essential elements of light, movement and colour can be pared down to their most fundamental and universal forms, while still evoking the complexities of reality and referencing the history of painting itself.”
—Stéphane Aquin

Reflecting on the elemental connections between land, sea, and sky, Sean Scully’s Landline series is the most acclaimed of his distinguished career. Landline Inwards is an outstanding example from this body of work and was painted in 2015, the same year that the artist debuted this series as a major highlight of the 56^th Biennale at the Palazzo Falier, his first major show in Venice. The Landlines have since also been the subject of major exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., which travelled to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, and at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, which ran alongside the 58th Venice 2019, demonstrating the institutional calibre of these works.

“I was thinking of Venice and then about the works I was doing. The Landline works I was doing kind of sway. I know it sounds a little obvious, but it’s very much like the way the water heaves in the canals of Venice; it bumps up against the architecture and it goes back. So it’s like the water.”
—Sean Scully

Drawing upon his perceptions and experiences of the natural world, one particular influence on the Landlines that Scully refers to is his time spent in the Italian island city of Venice. The works in the series eloquently capture and distil his memories of the floating city, exemplified in Landline Inwards with its opulent, teal colour palette. Refining and condensing the essence of the dappled canals and the sunlit linear waterways carving their way through the ancient architecture of the city, the supple blue green horizontals in Landline Inwards transports us to the Venetian landscape. Painted in oil on aluminium, Scully’s choice of medium lends the lustrous, painterly surface of the work a quality that seems to ebb and flow with the horizontal movement of the brushstrokes, the pigment flowing freely across the smooth metal surface. The gleam of the aluminium seeps through from beneath the layers of paint, affording the work an iridescent effect reminiscent of water. This saturated, jewel-like rendering evokes Claude Monet’s earlier depictions of Venice. In 1908, the French Impressionist painter visited the city with his wife and, inspired by the ever changing, watery light, produced 37 oil paintings that became some of the most revered of his works. Like Scully, he too was deeply and profoundly influenced by the beauty and intensity of the light on the canals and sought to capture its essence. In Palazzo da Mula, Venice, for example, the shimmering, colour-drenched composition shares the same horizontals – of the architecture, the elegant gondola, the edge of the water lapping against its façade, and even the direction of the brushstrokes themselves – as well as the carefully balanced azure palette as Landline Inwards.

 

Whilst the vivid, tonal landscape echoes the philosophies of the Impressionists, Scully’s distilled compositions also recall the preoccupation with the formal elements of colour, shape and form championed by the Abstract Expressionists. His work has been compared, in particular, with the colour field works of Mark Rothko, whose meditative layers of pigment also endeavour to reduce the variances of human experience into concentrated, immersive blocks of colour. The soft, fluid brushstrokes that we encounter in Landline Inwards are particularly redolent of Rothko’s indeterminate forms, one hue blending seamlessly into the next, and also mark a significant shift in Scully’s practice, away from the more hard-edged, geometric lines of his early practice, and would go on to define his iconic Landline series.

 

“I used metal in the first place to set up a material contrast with the humid romance of the paint, and the way I use it. Then recently I began to paint on top of metal, and I loved the way the paint skidded across the surface. Setting up something emotional against a material emphatically of our age.”
—Sean ScullyAnother initial source of inspiration from the natural world that informed Scully’s Landline series came from the North Norfolk coastline, in England’s East Anglia. In 1999, the artist was struck by the compositional ‘stripes’ created by the edge of a grassy cliff, the expanse of North Sea and the cool grey sky stretching along the horizon line. The dusky, greenish slate-blue and seafoam passages in Landline Inwards perhaps also recall these initial impressions of Norfolk, the singular hues extracted from the coastal landscape infused through the broad, loose banded stripes. This same coastline similarly inspired the work of Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), whose minimal depictions of Holkham sands in the 1960s also isolate the specific tones and textures inherent to the expansive, grassy Norfolk dunes to form the bases of his abstracted compositions. Both artists, through a sophisticated understanding of colour and form, are able to encapsulate this distinct sense of place without the need for any figurative representation.

 

In reducing his perceptions, impressions and memories of places and environments to their simplest and most fundamental elements, Scully is able to convey a unique and indisputable ‘feeling’ of a particular moment. As such, his paintings are also intrinsically imbued with emotion and a deep sense of nostalgia. In the tradition of other preeminent 20^th Century painters, Scully also forges his own, unique visual language, typified in Landline Inwards, rooted in his own deeply personal encounters with the natural world.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• A major highlight of the 56th Venice Biennale, Sean Scully’s acclaimed Landline series made its US debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
   

• Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and raised in South London, and he works across his studios in New York, London, Munich, and Barcelona. He was named a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013.
   

• Scully’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous important institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Albertina, Vienna; and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, among many others. A selection of his works spanning more than five decades of his practice have most recently been on show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.