SEAN SCULLY: Aran
Galerie Lelong

Talk of an artist finding his form in the landscape would ordinarily entail passivity on his part: Something observed in the world triggers a visual idea to be elaborated on canvas. But with Sean Scully, it seems, it is the other way around. As an abstract painter, his familiar format entails grids of interlocking vertical and horizontal lozenges or stripes. Photography, an important though sideline activity for him, is a means not of discovery so much as confirmation, if not vindication. He literally finds his already formed form.

Rather like the painter Ellsworth Kelly, who also delights in photographing examples of his own shape vocabulary in the landscape, Mr. Scully has a body of photographs from world travels that isolate his trademark bars and blocks of color in the man-made environment. He often shoots in locations that are at once humble and exotic, such as Moroccan desert towns and Barcelona backstreets. He has a penchant for rough shapes, muted colors, and distressed surfaces in his painting, which he typically finds in down-at-the-heel neighborhoods.

Mr. Scully’s portfolio of two dozen black-and-white photographs, “Aran” (2007), is both true to form and, in eschewing color, a departure. The images are of highly distinctive stone structures on the windy, remote Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. Mr. Scully, who was raised in London and is now based in New York, was born in Ireland. The walls and houses, constructed out of found slabs of rock of disparate size, bear an uncanny resemblance to his own paintings. His early work literally abutted different-shaped supports against or within one another, while his recent “Wall of Light” canvases are more conventionally unified.

As drywalls, the blocks have to “pull their weight” in ingeniously improvised primitive engineering. What gives them a distinctive though practical beauty is the robust, decisive way they alternate vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stacking arrangements.

Mr. Scully’s capturing of these ready-made Scullys is an exercise, at once, of egotism and humility, of finding himself and losing himself in the landscape. The photographs are keenly cropped and crisply focused. They celebrate the extraordinary sculptural artistry of the walls’ anonymous makers. Often Mr. Scully extends the conceit as his lens draws in grass and sea in further compositional layerings of texture and shape.

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