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Quintana Roo

In the 1980s, Sean Scully took trips to Mexico that led to the development of his signature style of painting stacked stripes and bands. He observed how sunlight hitting ancient Mayan stone walls there seemed, to him, to bring the structures to life. Scully brought these observations to his oil painting Quintana Roo in 1980, made on two canvases placed tightly side by side. Together, they stand seven feet tall by nearly four feet wide. Each panel consists of 86 meticulously laid, perfectly even horizontal bands in only two colors per panel. On the left, dark brown alternates with rusty orange. On the right, a red wine color alternates with a slightly darker red wine. It feels almost as if the darker stripes are in shadow above and beneath the lighter stripes, repeating over and over top to bottom.

The rows and columns in the stone walls Scully admired are neat and orderly but also appear to waver and ripple. This optical illusion is created by the natural variability in the size and shape of the tightly-packed, rounded stones and how light and shadow play across them. The painting animates this concept by starting the pairs of stripes with the darker color on the left panel and starting with the lighter color on the right panel. They may appear flat when viewing only one panel at a time. But when stepping further away to take them in together, the dark and light then alternate both horizontally and vertically. Brushstrokes in the stripes create a texture that adds to this animated, organic feeling. The painting as a whole vibrates with life and energy even though the dark colors feel brooding and solemn.

One final detail that separates Quintana Roo from the Minimalist art movement Scully had been part of is in the nearly imperceptible difference in size between the two tall panels. The panel on the right is an inch narrower than its partner on the left. Perhaps this is a nod to the organic differences found in the stone walls. Maybe it was one subtle effort on Scully’s part to break out of the confines of Minimalism and begin to express himself and his passions with more nuance.