PARIS.- The colour blue has a particular resonance within Sean Scully’s practice, and with the exhibition Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, his unique expression of light and emotion through chromatic nuance is celebrated to particularly poetic effect. Each of the nine gem-like Wall of Light paintings, in various shades of blue on copper, is an ode to the echoes of memory and place that the colour blue stirs in the artist.

When asked by the poet and art critic Kelly Grovier when it was in his life that he first started thinking about art, Scully responded with a memory from his early childhood in London: ‘I remember I had a bicycle. And I’ll never forget it. It was a cerulean blue.’ It was in the recognition of ‘that lovely pale blue’ and the feelings it evoked, back in his earliest pre-school years, that Scully believes he became an artist. Scully began the Blue series of paintings during a two-year period living in Hampstead, London, and working from a studio in Kentish Town, not far from where he spent those first formative years with his blue bicycle, living in his grandmother’s boarding house in Highbury. The resulting muted, beclouded cobalts and greys of Wall Cobalt White (2024) conjure London’s cool northerly light. With Wall Blue Moor (2024), the viewer senses the grey rain of a deep Hampstead twilight, and with Wall Pale Grey (2024), the seeping post-war fog.

‘When I make a painting,’ Scully states, ‘that’s when all my turmoil is in the air. They’re not a way of showing, they’re a way of dealing with things. [...] If I make a painting with high colour, I’m very proud of myself because I've overcome my sorrow.’ In Scully’s writing practice, too, whether in prose or poetry, memories of places and of moments in time, and the emotions that accompany them, are often crystallised in colour. In his poem, also titled Blue, which features in the book published to accompany the exhibition, he memorialises the childhood experience of watching his mother sing Unchained Melody on stage: ‘people held hands, the hall turned Blue.’ The emotive, thunderous lilacs and mauves of Blue Bird (2024) and Night Sea (2024) bring to mind the artist’s mother on the Vaudeville stage in Sheerness – ‘the incandescent female, in a pink taffeta dress’ singing her ‘sad song’ – and ‘the passage of rivers, that take us out there, out to the blue sea’.

The works in the exhibition embody not only the artist’s deep emotional connection to place, but a profound engagement with the history of painting, and ‘the deep romantic tradition of light-filled colored surfaces’. Exploring the sweep of emotional and improvisational possibilities accessible through the colour blue, Scully mines the tonal registers used in the early 20th century by the great painters of European Modernism. The palettes of the works on view refract, in turn, the melancholy of Picasso’s Blue Period and Matisse’s 1902 painting Notre-Dame, une fin d’après-midi, and the ethereal, luminous Mediterranean blues of the works Matisse painted in his Tangier studio a decade later.

The intense tonalities of works such as Wall Sea Blue (2024) appear to directly translate the mellow light Matisse discovered in Morocco. Adding to this remarkable colouristic depth and warmth, each of the Wall of Light works on view in the exhibition is painted on a luminous copper ground. Testifying to an expressive, loose handling of paint, the artist’s brushstrokes allow the underpainted layers of colour beneath them to glow through, while the copper supports glint in the seams between the interlocking rectangles to imbue the cool atmospheres of the paintings with a warm incandescent flush, as if lit from behind or within. This effect recalls the closing lines of Kelly Grovier’s poem selected by Scully for the accompanying book: ‘The sky is empty but the stars bleed through – cerulean, cobalt, and Prussian Blue.’

Alongside the Wall of Light works on copper in shades of blue, a monumental work belonging to the artist’s Landline series, painted on an aluminium ground, is also on view in the exhibition. Begun in 2013, Scully’s Landline series marked a shift in the artist’s practice, evoking horizons and landscapes, rather than the architectural, brick-like structures of his Wall of Light compositions. The artist’s abstractions are always rooted in the forms he finds in the real world: as Scully put it, they ‘lurch towards association’. In the large-scale Landline Vermillion Grey (2025), it is the ubiquitous motif of the horizon line that he repeatedly stacks, channelling the genre of landscape painting through the meditative visual language of geometric abstraction. ‘In that sense’, the artist explained, ‘my abstraction is quite figurative. It is not very remote.’ This felt proximity resonates throughout the exhibition, where each abstraction distills an echo of the world – of the remembered scenes, shifting light and lived emotions to which each is tethered.

An intervention by Scully is on view at the Estorick Collection, London until 23 November 2025, showcasing a body of his work alongside that of Italian master Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), and including a work from the Blue series. Scully’s work is presented with the work of Paul Klee, in In Touch. Encounters in the Collection, on view until April 2026 at the Hilti Art Foundation, in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais will be accompanied by a book including illustrations of the Blue works, as well as poems by Kelly Grovier, Elizabeth Bishop, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sean Scully himself.