Sean Scully: "I do what I want because, in a way, I feel protected."

BarcelonaSean Scully (Dublin, 1945) arrives overflowing to the Quarry, where starting this Friday they are dedicating a retrospective to him with some sixty works, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs. One of them is a gigantic sculpture that can be seen in the building's courtyard. Scully has to deal with a stream of journalists and is eager to start conducting interviews. "The importance of art is immeasurable; it is the opposite of evil in the world, of corruption and wars, which are the consequence," says Scully, best known for his abstract paintings where he combines color fields as if they were musical notes, and for interventions such as the of the Romanesque monastery of Santa Cecilia de Montserrat. He also believes that art has a deep spiritual charge and a transformative power: "My ambition, my destiny, is to bring a form of spirituality to the street, to reduce the distance between abstract art and life," he says.

Scully is considered one of the great names in contemporary art, but he did not have an easy path. He spent a childhood that he described as "deeply unhappy" in a very poor neighborhood in north London. Today his works fetch prices in the millions, but, having experienced poverty, he says he feels "free," that he knows how to "handle pressure," and that the most important thing is to "serve something greater than oneself." He even calmly addresses the most conflictive moments of his long relationship with Catalonia: he left Barcelona in 2021 amid complaints about "the insistence of the Catalans on speaking to him in Catalan" and that at school "they expected" her son to learn from her. "I was thinking about the health of Catalonia. I think it's important to keep a window open to the world in order to prosper. In the Netherlands, we generally speak English and Dutch; you can speak both languages. But I think that time has passed; it's crazy to live in an environment that's difficult to enter if you come from outside. Now we all depend on each other; Trump will break up the United States, and things will go wrong," she says. At that time, the project for a monographic museum in Montjuïc, for which she wanted to donate some two hundred works, had already been aborted. "It was a sad story; we were about to do it. I was already talking to the architect, Ando [the Japanese architect Tadao Ando], but the government changed and the project ended," she laments.

From minimalism to a painting of emotions

The exhibition at La Pedrera, curated by Javier Molins, is organized chronologically. This allows us to review the transformations that have taken place in Scully's work: settled in New York, he broke with the dominant minimalism and sought to introduce emotion into his painting through color, gesture, and descriptive titles, to make it more "dialectical." "I was at a dead end, on a path with no possibilities," Scully admits.

Further on, there are Africa (1989), the result of a trip that marked him, and another very intimate work, Empty heart (1987), the triptych he dedicated to his first son, Paul, who died in a car accident when he was eighteen. "It was the first painting I did in the first house I could buy in London. The colors are delicate, but materially it's quite brutal," says the artist. Scully also thinks of young people when asked, as a naturalized American, about current politics. "I am relentlessly against war; it's a price eighteen-year-olds pay; it's terrible. The war in Ukraine must stop as soon as possible; we must negotiate. But I think the fact that it's lasted so long is a matter of Biden and his son, and now we're talking about the end of this war. I'm more interested in the end than in the finale, rather than in other assessments. Politically, I'm in the middle," he warns.

The Return to Figuration

In the final stretch of the exhibition, which will remain open until July 6, two recent figurative paintings stand out. They are two portraits of his wife and son on a beach in the Bahamas called Eleuthera, which gives its name to the series to which they belong. "This series represents the recovery of my emotional life after the tragedy of the loss of my first child. We were on a beach in Eleuthera, which in Greek means free. I was taking photographs with my mobile phone, and it's very interesting because at first I thought that photographs were used to save memory, but I thought that I would like to immortalize it more, make it more permanent, and, of course, painting is eternal." Curiously, Scully made the drawing of his wife and son playing on the sand. BK_SLT_LNA~ This return to figuration seems anecdotal, and Scully has not included the paintings in the series Eleuthera for sale. Be that as it may, he hasn't been afraid to exhibit other paintings quite far removed from those that have shaped his career. "I've been asked a lot why I made this return to figuration. I'm not afraid of anything; I'm very ambitious, but at the same time, I'm not worried about the outcome, I'm not afraid. I do what I want because, in a way, I feel protected. I've felt protected since I was young, I don't know for myself. I've carried this feeling strongly."