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Sean Scully (b.1945) Passenger Line Black (2000) Oil on linen, 48 x 38cm (18.9 x 15'') Signed, inscribed and dated verso Exhibited: Galerie Lelong, Paris (original exhibition label verso) Painted in the same year as Wall of Light Orange Yellow, (Dublin City Gallery), which featured as one of Ireland's favourite paintings in RTE's recent television series, Passenger Line Black uses Scully's familiar device of a window or second panel of paint subsumed into a larger composition. The smooth opaque black and grey of the background painting is contrasted by the thicker impasto and industrial paint of the smaller work which uses more intense and more obvious brushstrokes. The cutting into the surface of the larger canvas and the placing of a second painting within it also draws attention to the physical construction of the artwork as an object as well as disrupting the conventional idea of an abstract painting as a unified system of form and colour. Scully's deployment of the window device relates to his experience of living in cities especially London where he began his career as an artist in the 1960s. According to the artist, 'a window is a promise like a doorway', that is a way into the painting and a way of relieving the tension of the painting surface. The device is also well known in the work of Henri Matisse, an artist whom Scully admires. Like Matisse, Scully's work is often triggered by a response to the tangible sensation of light falling on the surface of a wall or building. The use of grids and lines of colour in Passenger Line Black also refers back into the history of modern art. Its occurrence in Scully's practice has been compared with the work of the abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko and even the earlier pioneer of abstract art, Piet Mondrian. Like these artists, Scully believes strongly that art should have a transformative function on the viewer. While referring to this spiritual tradition of modern art his work is equally influenced by many of the non art contexts in which colour and pattern assert themselves such as the dyed fabrics of Morocco, the painted hoardings of construction sites in New York and the reflections of strong colour on the walls of Mayan temples in Mexico. Scully's acclaimed use of abstraction blends the metaphysical with the physical, providing, as in this work, a contemporary and highly distinctive version of abstract art. Dr. Roisin Kennedy April 2014