Sean Scully

A sense of inner struggle--of self-purification and serenity won at great cost--pervades the most convincing canvases of abstract artist Scully. The Dublin-born painter pursues a ``romance with the stripe'' in pictures that explore the interaction between the horizontal and the vertical. Within this restrictive structural system, Scully has created his own complex universe, ranging from somber grid paintings to outpourings of extrovert energy. Some images are joyfully adventurous, others almost monastic in their austere sense of discipline and order. Startling color relationships, floating flag motifs and thickets of stripes that beckon the eye into their labyrinthine structures are hallmarks of an artist whose drawings, etchings, photographs and constructions are surveyed in this monograph by Poirier, art professor at City University of New York. (Dec.)