\n\tDespite the seeming economy of his aesthetic choices, Scully positions his work as being at war with Minimalism, committed instead to bringing human elements back into painting, what he termed “what’s interesting, engaging, perverse, and beautiful about human nature.” The work’s invocation of the spiritual and poetic in its expressive textures and colors has multiple sources. An early job loading trucks with flattened boxes at a cardboard factory led to a lifelong interest in stacking. The drystone walls of Scully’s native Ireland and later travels to Morocco and Mexico—Labna is named for an ancient Maya settlement on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula—suggested new ways of injecting spiritual concerns into abstract painting, seeing in these sources “repetitive ritualized movements.” Scully likened the result, in its richly painted rhythm of alternating vertical and horizontal blocks, to a “nocturnal Zen world” of meditation.\n
\n\n\tJames Christen Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum\n
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