"One might say the passionate colour of immanent desire meets the intellectual resistance of transcendent geometry, resulting in an uneasy balance of forces, a nervous self-containment and a sense of unfinished, burdensome emotional business..." about Sean Scully
...They reveal the unresolvable conflict between the determinate and indeterminate —
Scully is a humanist Old Master in abstract disguise. His paintings have the spiritual depth and universal import of the best Old Master paintings, distilled and coded in modernist abstract terms. In Scully spiritual experience is conveyed through nuance and intensity rather than through iconography and imagery — and with greater effect. For where traditional art mediates spiritual meaning through cultural symbols, so that it becomes more of a learned communication than a lived experience, Scully gives it direct perceptual life, so that it becomes an intensely lived meaning. It loses its dogmatic character and becomes a nuanced process. In much traditional painting the paradox of the best abstract painting is that it gives spiritual immediacy to what is a dead academism. Paradoxically, spirit is no longer an abstract concept in abstract painting, but a concrete sense experience. - Donald Kuspit
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