A monumental and richly resonant work, Red Light (1999) by Sean Scully encapsulates the artist's masterful balance of emotional intensity and formal precision. Executed at a scale befitting its grandeur, Red Light exemplifies Scully's celebrated multi-panel compositions and his enduring exploration of abstraction, colour, and the human experience. Works from this distinguished series reside in the prestigious collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, cementing Scully’s place at the pinnacle of contemporary painting.

At its core, Red Light consists of horizontal bands of deep, saturated colour—garnet, maroon, and black—laid across the canvas with a lyrical yet structural energy. These thick, alternating stripes seem to pulse and push against each other, creating a powerful sense of three-dimensionality. The contrasting panels within the composition, with their distinctive horizontal and vertical stripes, reinforce this effect. At the top of the painting, a square panel showcases a meditative interplay of grey and gold, providing a harmonious counterpoint to the more vibrant, vertical stripes in the inset below. Together, these elements converge to create a work that feels both restrained and exuberant—a delicate balance of precision and emotion.

Scully’s use of colour is essential to the painting’s visceral impact. His thickened oil paints, applied with broad, five-inch brushstrokes, bring a tactile quality to the surface, while his unique application of varnish enhances the interplay between tones. The artist’s assertion that “Colours are always subverted by the colours underneath” is palpably felt in Red Light. The layers of pigment create a complex dialogue in which no colour exists in isolation; instead, they blend, push, and resist one another, contributing to a work of remarkable depth and texture. This dynamic relationship of colours not only heightens the visual experience but also reflects Scully’s desire to map emotional and physical connections through abstraction. As he puts it, his work explores “how bodies come together. How they touch. How they separate.” In Red Light, these ideas unfold through Scully’s gestural handling of pigment, evoking both corporeality and a sense of human intimacy.

Scully’s artistic practice draws on a wide range of influences, seamlessly blending the formal traditions of European painting with the boldness of American abstraction. The dark, brooding intensity of Spanish masters such as Velázquez and Goya informs his use of drama and chiaroscuro, while the colour sensibilities of Paul Gauguin are evident in the lush vibrancy of his palette. Nevertheless, Scully’s work remains distinctively his own. By the 1980s, he had broken away from the cool detachment of Minimalism, rejecting what he saw as the sterility of the movement. Instead, he embraced a more personal, emotive form of abstraction, rooted in the physicality of paint and the expressiveness of gesture. As such, Red Light is not only an exquisite example of Scully’s mature style but also a testament to his ongoing commitment to reinvigorating abstract painting with emotion and poetry.

In Red Light, Scully achieves what few painters can: he fuses the personal with the universal, creating a work that speaks of the complexities of human relationships through the language of colour, form, and abstraction. It is a painting that rewards close inspection, revealing layer upon layer of meaning, both visual and emotional.