Sean Scully's place as an artist is now a well-established one internationally; and so, it would seem, is his style. It is fully as recognisable as Agnes Martin's faint, yet marvellously eloquent stripes or Lucian Freud's pitted, adipose nudes - in fact, short of retinal failure, it would be difficult to mistake a typical, mature Scully work for anybody else's. While one does not look at him for infinite variety or resource, his personality is compact, strong and almost domineeringly his own.
In a sense, the Hugh Lane exhibition can be taken as roughly complementary to the not-so-long-ago exhibition of his large paintings at IMMA, an impressive event which showed Scully-the-heavyweight in full strength. Here, however, we have his works on paper, extending back to 1975 and amounting to a virtual retrospective exhibition in their own right. It shows that stylistically and formally he has come a long way, though by a steady, unspectacular progression rather than by leaps and sudden flights.
The earliest works shown suggest a debt to Albers and the Bauhaus tradition as it took root in America, and perhaps even to Vasarely. In the 1980s Scully grew much less linear and geometrical, often employing contrary patterns of stripes, but making them irregular and sometimes blurred. It was not until quite late in this decade that he attained his present style, in which the surfaces have an autonomous life, edges are brushed over and the colours have his characteristic dour, smouldering depth (yet there are curious backslidings stylistically - for instance, Santa Barbara of 1987, which suggests the influence of Ellsworth Kelly and also has affinities with Brice Marden).
The more recent works, in a variety of media, make up an exceptional body of work, full of deep, mysterious colour, small but imaginative shifts of focus and an apparently endless ability to form new combinations from a very limited range of shapes - stripes, rectangles, squares (sometimes inset, and making the picture plane ambiguous and the pictures resonant with inner space). It is these works which finally convince you that Scully is really as good as his admirers say he is.
For some years now there has been an argument, not "raging" but continuous, as to which is the best or better, Scully's big paintings or his works on paper. It is easy to answer that they are two aspects of the one man, but personally I prefer more and more the smaller-format works; at best they have all the thrust and presence of the big paintings, but without their almost bullying physique and rhetoric. They also have an extra dimension of mystery, spatial depth and inner life, and an intimacy which is lost in the massive "public" facade of the oils, powerful as they are at their best. Runs until November 23rd
