Universal accidents

Sean Scully's work has benefited from his nomadic life, but the internationally successful painter is now enjoying reconnecting with Ireland, he tells AIDAN DUNNE

SEAN SCULLY is an excellent and, in some ways, a surprising choice to launch the art galleries in the remodelled, refurbished Ulster Museum. He's a good choice, for example, because his exhibition, a huge retrospective called Constantinople or The Sensual Concealed, comfortably populates the formidable sequence of spaces, while also linking them elegantly together. He is perhaps a surprising choice because, although a truly international figure – he mostly lives and works in New York City, and in a rural setting close to Munich, and in Barcelona – he was born in Dublin, spent his early years there, and identifies strongly with Ireland.

He is particularly happy that the show is on in Belfast. For one thing, he feels that characteristics of his work relate to the city’s past and present – and not at all in the predictable Northern Irish sense of adherence to entrenched historical narratives and identities. Belfast, as he sees it, is as much a model for cities of the future as of the past.

“It’s about managing to negotiate a space between hard positions that are not particularly compatible,” he says. “That’s what people have got to do, now, not just as they are doing, in Belfast but more or less everywhere.”

It’s also, incidentally, a pretty good description of what he sets out to do in his paintings.

The paintings are abstract, but not in a self-referential, formalistic way. They embrace the discipline of a formal vocabulary, but rather than claiming autonomy, a separateness from the world, they are happily, deeply immersed in its gritty actuality, hence The Sensual Concealed. The geometric rigour of the grid is informed by, in Kant's phrase, "the crooked timber of humanity".

Scully himself says of them: “They’re not in agreement with other abstract paintings. They’re kind of crazy, experiential, informed by all kind of things – by the light in the city, by something I’ve read. As Klee said, it’s the accidents that make art.”

In a way, with their elements of repetition and variation, they are readily comparable to several kinds of music – he mentions Irish traditional music, for one. Constantinopleis a memorable exhibition, and an important part of its outstanding quality is that it is, to a significant degree, a physical, spatial experience. It was organised by the Foundation for Art and Culture in Bonn and was shown originally at the MKM Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg. Credit must go to its curator, Susanne Kleine, for a skilful selection. While Scully's paintings tend to look well in reproduction (as images, in other words), they are always more than images. For more than 30 years he has been working to establish them as physical objects, presences, something elucidated to great effect in the show.

Big, expansive paintings are juxtaposed with much smaller and occasionally tiny ones. Arran, for example, is extremely small, an island figuratively and literally, battered and defined by its enfolding oceans of water or, in immediate terms, wall-space. It draws you in, to consider its detail, and what might be hidden in its intricacies. Titian's Robe Pink, on the other hand, at four metres-plus across, involves a walk just to get its measure. You have to negotiate it (to borrow Scully's words), and perhaps step back, try to get a sense of what you're dealing with.

You could, of course, at any stage dismiss it, as you might any of his works, and simply refuse to get involved. You might say: but it’s just a series of coloured rectangles. Or, as people do: any child could do that. Or you might begin to dwell on it, the calculations involved in its making, its balance of colours, textures and spaces, its edges and layers. Either way, it’s likely that it will lodge in your mind. If you dismiss it, you might subsequently be encouraged to wonder about it.

Often, what we see from day to day does not immediately make sense and, artistically, if it is too easily assimilated, its appeal is likely to be short-lived. Only in time does a meaning become accessible and apparent. As Kleine writes, on initial glance Scully’s paintings “are alien to us, appearing too abstract to admit easy access”. Allow yourself to engage with them, though, she continues, and you will sense their great inner tension, their emotional breadth, their “almost spiritual quality”.

THE EARLIEST WORKS in the show, crisply organised, grid-based abstracts made in London in the early 1970s, see Scully working towards a personal language by means of getting rid of everything extraneous to his aims. From mid-decade, with his move to New York, a tightly woven defensiveness creeps into his compositions, and it was only by reaching a point of something like desperation that he broke through, around 1980, to a way of making paintings that was, and is, in tune with his character and sensibility.

Kleine suggests that Scully is more at ease with himself and perhaps feels freer in his recent work. The exhibition features a large number of pieces made in the last 10 years or so, and certainly in that time he has fruitfully explored old and new formats with immense assurance and something like classical poise. In 2002 he took up a position as professor of painting in Munich. He says he loves Germany (his six-month-old son, Oisín, was born there) and is learning German.

“The German character is very exacting, and very rigorous, but emotionally open as well,” he says. “I’ve felt very connected to the students, and I think they to me. It’s been a great place for me to develop, as regards painting and as regards ideas. The support there for painting is inviolable – I mean, they don’t just like it, they can talk about it.”

He has always shown an emigrant’s willingness to adapt to new places and circumstances, moving from Dublin to London as a child, settling in New York (probably the most artistically competitive environment in the West), rediscovering his connections with Ireland and finding a foothold in Barcelona, then Munich.

“Going to new places has been incredibly good for my work,” he says. “It’s always good to arrive into somewhere you don’t know. I mean, the person who should be painting universally – which is what I try to do – and is qualified to do so must be the immigrant. You have to have a broken context to make something new. In New York in the 1950s it was Willem de Kooning, for example. I think art should aspire to the universal, which is maybe slightly unfashionable now, when so many people want to tell their own exact stories from their own precise point of view. But where does that get us?”

One notable development in his work is that he’s been painting a lot on sheets of copper and aluminium as well as on canvas. “You can get some surfaces painting on metal that you just can’t get on canvas,” he says. “Canvas has character, it brings a lot to the process. Its texture is a series of points that catch the paint, so it immediately slows you, and that slowness comes through in the painting. Whereas metal – it’s like painting on glass, the way Kandinsky did. There’s no friction. It’s a slick surface. It calls for a different way of painting.”

The edges of canvas, he points out, are rounded, whereas you can opt to use metal to make a sharp, abrupt edge. “I used to love, as a kid, the way cheesewire cuts through a block of cheese. It’s cut into two pieces, but they stay together.”

Meanwhile, the vertical panels of the Robe series of paintings are painted separately and then brought together. “I don’t quite know how they’re going to match up when they meet,” he says. “They’ll be slightly off. The grid is getting molested. It’s a disturbed, jolted grid. It’s almost the way film is cut, I mean really cut. There’s surface, and then there’s no surface.”

IN 2011, THERE will be a large retrospective of his work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin. It’s a sign of just how much in demand and how busy he is that it’s but one of four museum shows he has scheduled internationally for that year. Don’t wait until 2011 though to see a retrospective. What will be on view in Dublin will only partly overlap with what’s showing now in Belfast. And there are so many superb paintings in the Belfast show that it is pretty much essential viewing for anyone interested in or curious about his work. There’s also a room permanently devoted to his paintings in the Hugh Lane, a project that is close to his heart.

“I remade my relationship with Ireland from about 1978,” he says. “I started coming over to teach . My re-introduction to Ireland was pushed along by the critic Dorothy Walker. She thought she’d integrate me into Dublin society. I’d find myself at a lunch table with Seamus Heaney.”

He feels at home now in Dublin (though he points out that the two utterly indispensable places for him at the moment are the US and Germany) and notes wryly that: “I did find that the more famous I got internationally, the more some people in Dublin seemed to like me.”

That his exhibition is on in Belfast is important in several ways to him. “I used to feel, when I’d visit Dublin, that I was an outsider, that I was less Irish than other people here somehow, that they knew something about Irishness that I didn’t. But when I got to Belfast – and the people there were fantastic, they were incredible – I didn’t feel that any more. I felt Irish.”

Constantinople or The Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scullyis at the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast until Feb 14, 2010; 048-90395203