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Ensayo del lote
Included in Sean Scully’s 2018 exhibition Landlines and other recent works at the De Pont Museum, Tilburg, from where it was acquired by the present owner, Landline Crimson (2015) is a large-scale painting from one of the artist’s most acclaimed series. Horizontal bands of brooding colour and active, gestural brushstrokes create a poetic evocation of land and sea. Its stripes of deep mauve and two distinct blues—one a dark and distant ultramarine, the other brighter, its surface dancing like light on water—each have their own distinct body, gleam and personality, seeming to shift and shimmer against one another. Scully seeks to paint ‘this sense of the elemental coming-together of land and sea, sky and land, of … horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending—the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their colour, and the soft uncertain space between them’ (‘Landline’, in F. Ingleby, ed., Sean Scully: Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings, London, 2006, p. 125). The aqueous tones of Landline Crimson testify to his time in Venice during the 2015 Biennale, where the first Landlines were debuted in an exhibition at the Palazzo Falier, and he found fresh inspiration in the city’s glittering confluence of water, light and ancient stone.
Scully was born in Ireland and raised in London, and today keeps studios in New York, Barcelona and Mooseurach, a small town in the Bavarian Alps. His practice is deeply embedded in landscape and the places in which he has lived and worked. The Landlines are rooted in his memories of standing on precipices—in the Aran Islands, the western-most edge of Europe facing out on the Atlantic, or in Norfolk, looking eastward across the North Sea—and wanting to capture the gently moving layers of sea and sky. ‘Landlines stand for edges,’ he explains (‘Landline’, in K. Grovier, ed., Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin, 2016, p. 301). The edges of things have long fascinated Scully, whose Wall of Light and Doric series scrutinised how natural forces such as light and weather perpetually transform the manmade world. With the Landlines he inverts this gaze to consider the architectural qualities of nature.
While the idea for the Landlines emerged at the turn of the millennium, the series to which the present work belongs was begun in 2013. Having travelled across the globe over the previous years, the idea of changing horizons had taken on increasingly personal significance for Scully. In 2012 he had suffered a debilitating back injury, and found comfort in the act of conjuring the landscape as he returned to painting, taking therapeutic pleasure in the broad, sweeping motion of the brush. ‘Horizontal stripes are like the horizon—resting, in repose’, he explained. ‘They are tranquil’ (quoted in Sean Scully: Landline, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C., 2018, p. 12). In keeping with this mood, Scully adopted a warm, rich palette, borrowing hues from the work of artists including Titian and Veronese. In 2015 paintings such as Landline Crimson, echoes of those Venetian masters merge with Scully’s impressions of the floating city itself, where the lines between land, sea and sky are forever in flux.
Scully was born in Ireland and raised in London, and today keeps studios in New York, Barcelona and Mooseurach, a small town in the Bavarian Alps. His practice is deeply embedded in landscape and the places in which he has lived and worked. The Landlines are rooted in his memories of standing on precipices—in the Aran Islands, the western-most edge of Europe facing out on the Atlantic, or in Norfolk, looking eastward across the North Sea—and wanting to capture the gently moving layers of sea and sky. ‘Landlines stand for edges,’ he explains (‘Landline’, in K. Grovier, ed., Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin, 2016, p. 301). The edges of things have long fascinated Scully, whose Wall of Light and Doric series scrutinised how natural forces such as light and weather perpetually transform the manmade world. With the Landlines he inverts this gaze to consider the architectural qualities of nature.
While the idea for the Landlines emerged at the turn of the millennium, the series to which the present work belongs was begun in 2013. Having travelled across the globe over the previous years, the idea of changing horizons had taken on increasingly personal significance for Scully. In 2012 he had suffered a debilitating back injury, and found comfort in the act of conjuring the landscape as he returned to painting, taking therapeutic pleasure in the broad, sweeping motion of the brush. ‘Horizontal stripes are like the horizon—resting, in repose’, he explained. ‘They are tranquil’ (quoted in Sean Scully: Landline, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C., 2018, p. 12). In keeping with this mood, Scully adopted a warm, rich palette, borrowing hues from the work of artists including Titian and Veronese. In 2015 paintings such as Landline Crimson, echoes of those Venetian masters merge with Scully’s impressions of the floating city itself, where the lines between land, sea and sky are forever in flux.