Aran 2005

This photograph, Aran, by Sean Scully, features what looks like a hand-built wall, formed from irregular and jagged rocks. The monochrome enhances the textures, and, for me, evokes a sense of place and a feeling of timelessness. I can imagine Scully finding this wall, responding to it, composing the picture plane, feeling the mass and the weight of the wall. I can imagine him focusing on the vertical and horizontal stresses, and thinking about the wall’s structure and the light playing across its surfaces. Each stone seems carefully placed, almost like brushstrokes. The way the stones overlap and intersect reminds me of layering in painting, how shapes and forms emerge through a process of addition and subtraction. I get a sense of the human hand, the labor, the effort—all part of the language of abstraction. Scully has built his career on abstraction, but here in his photograph, he seems to find it in the world already. He reminds me that abstraction is a way of seeing, a way of understanding the underlying structures of reality, whether it’s in a painting or a stone wall.