Scully is a painter who divides artists and critics. There are those who see him simply as painting grids in the modernist tradition, or as a Romantic whose beautiful brush marks continue to seduce the viewer in an age of hard-edged conceptualism. But that, I believe, is to misunderstand the timeless metaphysics of these paintings. The struggle, the journey. Like a Russian Orthodox monk who sings the limited repertoire of notes of a Gregorian chant over and over, or a Japanese haiku master who constantly returns to the same poetic form of 5/7/5, Scully uses the constraints of the grid to go deeper and further into the terrain of the metaphysical. In the early twentieth century, Alexander Rodchenko tried to uncover the very foundations of painting and explore its molecular and atomic components in line and colour. Kandinsky saw music “as the ultimate teacher” of the painter, ideas that he explored when writing about his Christian eschatology in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Whilst Scully’s work, by comparison, is secular art for a secular age, he is still compelled by what Kandinsky called “an internal necessity”, where one boundary presses up against another with a sense of purpose or dissolves and shrinks away from its adjacent companion.
The thirty paintings, watercolours, mixed-media compositions and pastels featured in Moscow chronicle Scully’s rise to artistic heights. As the art critic and cultural philosopher Arthur Danto insisted, he “belongs on the shortest of shortlists of the major painters of our time.”
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