Sean Scully in Houghton Hall

As in almost all English manor houses, the arrival to it occurs through a long path that crosses huge gardens with the particularity that, in the case of Houghton Hall, they are populated by herds of deer. This house was built in 1720 for the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole, and currently belongs to David Cholmondeley, the seventh Marquess of Cholmondeley.

However, none of these characters is the object of the visit to this farm. The real protagonist is Sean Scully, considered the best abstract artist today, who exhibits his works in the domains of a family that has little to do with the humble origins of his own. A person from the service tells us where to park the car and then go to the entrance of the house where we are received with a glass of champagne. Once you enter the vast gardens, I find Sean Scully sitting on a bench watching the guests at the inauguration interact with his sculptures scattered throughout the labyrinthine gardens of this manor house.

Sean has lived in New York for several decades but plans to move to London in September. And his return to England could not have been bigger. Three days ago he inaugurated a permanent sculpture in Hannover Square, one of the most central squares in London, and now exhibits his works until October 29 at Houghton Hall, where English artists of the level of Tony Cragg or Anish Kapoor have previously exhibited.

However, his beginnings in London were not easy. "I was born in Dublin where we lived like gypsies with nowhere to go, every six months we moved house. We moved to London to the worst suburbs. When I turned five, we had already lived in more than ten houses so I had a clear sense of instability, "he confesses from that bank in which he contemplates as British high society and a good number of international collectors have come to contemplate works whose value amounts to more than one million dollars. However, Sean never loses sight of those humble origins: "In England you can go to night school and, if you sacrifice, you can change your life. Every school in England has free evening classes. We have to be proud of that. I studied very hard at night school and, in the end, I got into the Croydon School of Art."

Scully comes from a humble family but with a strong sense of morality forged over generations. His grandfather was sentenced to death for deserting the British army. "He was going to be shot at seven in the morning but chose to hang himself in the cell." As if that were not enough, his father also deserted during World War II, so he had to go to a military prison. "I come from a family of people who are used to dying for their principles," he says.

Many of the visitors who have come to the exhibition, including the director of the National Gallery in London, Gabriele Finaldi, probably do not know the details of Scully's life but undoubtedly appreciate a work that has already earned a prominent place in the history of art of the twenty-first century. Few contemporary artists can boast of having exhibited in museums as prestigious as the Metropolitan in New York, the Albertina in Vienna or the Philadelphia Art Museum.

A long road full of effort because, as Scully himself explains, "I'm a fucking fighter." Sean Scully belonged to a generation of young working-class people such as actor Michael Caine, model Twigy or the Beatles who wanted to change things in an England corseted by the strict rules of an era that was beginning to belong to the past. If something was clear to Scully at that time, it was that he did not want to have a conventional, predictable and boring life and art was a good refuge for him. In fact, at the age of 17, he worked at the Victoria Palace Hotel and escaped almost every day to see Vincent van Gogh's painting entitled "Van Gogh's Chair" (1888). An old esparto chair in which you can already see those lines that would later be so characteristic in Scully's work.

In 1973, Scully held his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London. The exhibition is a success and sells all his works. The London of that time was, as Scully himself points out, "a city full of temptations, of reasons not to work, of irony, and where every week there was a party".

In 1975, Sean Scully decided to move to New York. In 1977, he held his first solo exhibition in New York at the Duffy-Gibbs Gallery and a year later began teaching at Princeton University. When Scully arrived in New York her work became very minimalist. As he explains, “the color was reduced right down. What I did when I went there was really to strip myself right down to nothing, basically - as far down as I could go without having a thing. I didn't want to take anything with me. It was really an extreme action - personally quite dangerous, I think - and it was something I did with my entire being; there was a real sense of exitencial danger when I moved to New York“.

However, every artist struggles to find his own voice, so there comes a time when he decides to break with minimalism. "For five years, I was making extremely minimalist paintings. I was a highly respected member of the New York art community but in 1980, I broke away from minimalism. This led to outrage from my artist friends. People would look at my new works and say, What the hell is this? Suddenly I introduced emotion, color, relationship and descriptive titles such as Empty Heart, The Bather, Adoration... They were titles that were not allowed in the puritanism of minimalism." And it is the incomprehension and even contempt of their contemporaries is something inherent in artists who try to break with the established and seek new paths. Not in vain a mediocre painter like Giorgio Vasari said of Tintoretto that "if he had not abandoned the usual path and followed the beautiful style of his predecessors, he would have become one of the greatest painters seen in Venice".

Scully smiles when she hears Vasari's phrase and surely she must have heard some similar ones when she decided to abandon minimalism to make a type of painting in which she returned emotion to abstraction, so corseted in the limits of minimalism. We walk through the endless gardens of the Marquis of XXX and arrive at a sculpture composed of a tower of discs made of marble, a form that is repeated in another work made of stone. Scully explains that "these works are inspired by the mountains of coins that my father made at home, because every coin, no matter how small, was welcome at home."

And it is that Scully has not only transferred to sculpture, a recent practice in his production, all the iconography of his paintings, but also transfers his personal experiences because all his works arise from reality, his experiences, his travels, his readings, in short, his life.

Guests enter this manor house that has hosted famous friends of its owner such as the model Kate Moss, who is godmother of one of his daughters and there in one of its noblest rooms we can contemplate two of Scully's most recent paintings. These are his well-known Landlines, paintings with horizontal stripes, but with the particularity that they have inserted small paintings, which would respond to his line of work known as "Wall of Light", composed of vertical and horizontal stripes. These works alone condense much of Scully's output. On the one hand, we have the Landline that evoke the horizon lines. As the author himself explains, "before I used to constantly contemplate the horizon line, until the end of the sea, where it caresses the beginning of the sky, contemplate how the sky presses the sea, the way in which that line (that relationship) is painted. One day I was standing facing Ireland, on the edge of the island of Aran, projecting my eyes on the horizon. My next stop, the United States. Standing in the Old World watching and thinking about my new life in the New World, as so many other people had done before me... watching and waiting for my arrival in America. I think of the earth, the sea and the sky. And they always make this brutal connection. I try to paint it, to paint that feeling of elemental communion of sea and land, of heaven and earth, of blocks that come together on one side, stacked in horizontal lines of infinite beginning and end, to paint the way in which the blocks of the world embrace each other, rub against each other, their weight, their air, their color and the soft uncertain space between them. That's what my paintings Landline Sand, Landline Sea and Landline Blue are about."

On the other hand, we have the Wall of Light series, which emerged during a trip to Mexico. "In Mexico, when I was in the ruins, I did a little watercolor in which I wrote Wall of Light, I don't know why. Thirteen years later I started making my Wall of Light paintings," he explains. But from Mexico it also takes those geometric shapes of ruins such as Chichén Itzá or Uxmal. Some pyramids made with rectangular stone blocks very similar to those that will end up appearing in his work. And it is that these works belonging to the series "Wall of Light" function as authentic architectural walls.

And, finally, we have the inserts, those works that Scully inserts in others and that function as a window. "Windows are a huge metaphor for me. In the windows, what I call the double experience takes place: being inside and looking outside, being outside and looking inside. It is a great human invention. In fact, Window in English means opportunity."

Scully makes this statement in front of the huge windows of the halls of Houghton Hall that let in a light that bathes one of his sculptures made with Murano glass in which we can find almost all the colors of the rainbow. At that moment, a young woman tells us that we have to go to the room where the meal that the seventh Marquis of XXX offers to the guests will take place. A type of acts in which Scully does not feel very comfortable but that she knows are part of the experience of exhibiting in places like this.

However, if there is an exhibition that this artist will not forget, it will be the one that took place at the National Gallery in London in 2019 and that put his work in dialogue with Turner's. An exhibition that took place a few meters from the room that houses the van Gogh chair that Scully came to visit almost daily when she was 17 years old and worked at the XXX hotel. And, sometimes, dreams come true.