After visiting Scully’s show at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and seeing the stained-glass windows he made at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, Hortensia Herrero suggested to Sean Scully that he should carry out an intervention in the former chapel of the Palacio de Valeriola. It consisted of the stained-glass windows for this space – two rectangular, one square and the windows in the dome – and the painting Landline Heat (2020). “I wanted to make a room that was somehow soothing.A room that was a complete enviroment that, in fact, transform the light according to the time of day. So it would never be the same […] It’s as if the light is being traslated into interior light”
In the series of works called Landline, Scully embodies another constant element of his work: the lines of the horizon. As the artist himself points out in a text he wrote in July 2001 in his studio in the German town of Mooseurach: “I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming-together of land and sea, sky and land, of blocks coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending – the way the blocks of the world hug each other and brush up against each other, their weight, their air, their color, and the soft uncertain space between them”. A distinctive feature of the Landline in the Hortensia Herrero collection is that it contains drips of red paint at the bottom which remind us of the blood of Christ, an element very much present in the Christian imagery of Catholic churches and chapels.
