Born in Dublin, brought up in London, and working between New York, Munich, and Barcelona, Scully’s rootless childhood and itinerant working life informed the abstract painting for which he is famed. Paralleling his personal journey, Scully’s path to his individual project in abstraction stemmed from a desire to resolve the ‘Old World’ of European abstraction, represented for him by Mondrian, and the “all-over-ness…the anarchy, or levelling of order” of Jackson Pollock’s ‘New World’. This synthesis of old and new was filtered through the mysticism and melancholy of Mark Rothko’s work: “Nothing in a Rothko is hard, nothing is secure, and nothing is definite. He works sadly and constantly against the dying of his own light”. Although beginning his career nearly a generation after the apex of the New York school, America still represented for Scully the beating heart of abstraction. “America is a place about defining the future. That’s what I’m part of, this search for spiritual truth, the next wave of humanity.” Alongside photography and oil painting, Scully has consistently worked in pastel, as with Untitled (8.17.93), 1993. Consisting of multiple segments of paper, a disjointed maze of black and grey pastel bands, and a jolting, just off-centre rectangle of red and orange stripes, Untitled (8.17.93) possesses Scully’s quintessential structure. The fundamental motif of Scully’s idiomatic abstract language is the stripe “because I am an obsessive artist, not a formalist”. Manipulating stripes in a seemingly endless variety of combinations, Scully’s aesthetic, at its most elementary, derives from patterning within architectural forms. Brickwork, panelling, joints, fences, and corrugated iron sheets all feature in Scully’s photography, and inform the geometric formation within his painting. Traditionally associated with Romanticism and figuration, Scully transforms pastel to the service of modern abstraction in his practice. Nonetheless, whilst Untitled (8.17.93) is bound by geometry, the instability and fragility inherent in pastel pigment suggests a dissolution and delicacy within the work. A translucency to the medium, particularly in the grey stripes, introduces a sensation of light woven into the pigment as the cream ground joins in the overall radiance of the surface. As Untitled (8.17.93) oscillates between the luminosity of the grey and the density of impenetrable black, so metaphorically the work fluctuates between light and dark. “In a sense my work is a question of trying to retrieve the irretrievable,” Scully wrote in 2003. “My work has a lot of yearning in it. There is a structure and the structure is being undone or subverted by a sense of emotion and of loss.” Expressive yet controlled, sensual in its materiality yet defined by formal precision, epic in scale yet inherently fragile, Untitled (8.17.93) is imbued with Scully’s spirituality, mystery, and melancholy.