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Nobody could take these paintings for supergraphics. Their mood is, above all, reflective. They aspire to a rough, Doric calm. They do not move; or when they do, it is by a slow pressure of grainy abutting edges or, in a work like No Neo, 1984, by the slight bulging of stripes against their neighbors, like the entasis of a classical column. (The title means something; Scully wanted his painting to resist the sense of recycling that pervaded the '80s, neo-this and neo-that. "The art that interests me," he says flatly, "is heroic art.")
The sense of internal pressure confers urgency on these big surfaces and turns them into something other, and more physically compelling, than flat pattern. It's not that Scully has any strong sculptural impulse; when he makes one slab of a painting project an inch or two above the adjoining surface, it is still not meant to be seen in the round or to suggest material weight. But he does want to give the image the distinctness of a body, asserting itself against your gaze.
The world keeps peeping in, especially in Scully's color, which is richly organic and never blatant. Its tawny ochers and deep blues suggest landscape, though in a distant way. The whites in Pale Fire, 1988, are not flat white but a subtle paste applied over a warm brown ground in rapidly varying touches, so that they have the visual elasticity of flesh. Scully is a conservative, measured colorist. His sense of art, the seemingly obsolete act of communicating by smearing mud on cloth, is anchored in the past. You can see traces of his idols throughout -- especially, in his liking for silvery grays, pinks and a constant regulating black, Velasquez.
The paint goes on thickly but not with abandon. The surface seems to store light, like stone. It is opaque; you can't see through it or even into it. It is not about space. Besides, the inlaid, modular, even puzzle-like surfaces of Scully's recent canvases prevent the eye from roaming them too freely. Stray out of one box and you finish in another, not on a free horizon. Hence the density, the lack of spaces between things, which adds to the gravity of Scully's work. It has something to do with the largeness of architecture. But it is painting, all the way through.