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Lot Essay
‘His voids are as important as his marks. Rich with implication, they hang full and silent, sometimes in our present awareness, often in the future, and always imbued with the past.’
—J. BUTTERFIELD
An artist known as much for the gloriously bright expanses of white left at the centre of his works as for his vivid treatments of colour, Sam Francis’ paintings offer dazzling vistas over compositions of swooping, marbled forms. In this Bright Ring Drawing (1964), the artist produces a border of luminous colour and snaking line that hints at a world beyond the frame: two thick vertical bands of rich navy blue and viridian are balanced on either side of the painting, while intricately organic forms in red and pink seem to expand out from the corners into the blank space around the work. Yet while leading the mind into an imagined world of colour, these flashes also provide a frame for the void at the centre of the painting, a lake of white flecked with the barest marks of pigment; the lack of visual information clears the way for the viewer, allowing them to fill the space of the painting with their own psychical experiences – memories, emotions, meandering trains of thought, fears, hopes.
In developing one of the most distinctive and brilliant abstract styles of the twentieth-century Francis took influence not only from his fellow American Abstract Expressionists but also the Art Informel painters of his adopted home of Paris. Indeed, while Abstract Expressionism’s painterly gestures and busy fields of colour often tended to overwhelm and even erase the viewer’s subjectivity by virtue of their sheer psychological intensity, Francis’ vision returns it to the heart of the experience of looking at a painting: as the artist himself said, ‘The space at the centre of these paintings is reserved for you’ (S. Francis, quoted in Albert-Fernand Haelemeersch, ‘Sam Francis; Remembering’, in Sam Francis: Remembering, exh. cat., Museum Jan van der Togt, Amsterdam, 2004, p. 5).
—J. BUTTERFIELD
An artist known as much for the gloriously bright expanses of white left at the centre of his works as for his vivid treatments of colour, Sam Francis’ paintings offer dazzling vistas over compositions of swooping, marbled forms. In this Bright Ring Drawing (1964), the artist produces a border of luminous colour and snaking line that hints at a world beyond the frame: two thick vertical bands of rich navy blue and viridian are balanced on either side of the painting, while intricately organic forms in red and pink seem to expand out from the corners into the blank space around the work. Yet while leading the mind into an imagined world of colour, these flashes also provide a frame for the void at the centre of the painting, a lake of white flecked with the barest marks of pigment; the lack of visual information clears the way for the viewer, allowing them to fill the space of the painting with their own psychical experiences – memories, emotions, meandering trains of thought, fears, hopes.
In developing one of the most distinctive and brilliant abstract styles of the twentieth-century Francis took influence not only from his fellow American Abstract Expressionists but also the Art Informel painters of his adopted home of Paris. Indeed, while Abstract Expressionism’s painterly gestures and busy fields of colour often tended to overwhelm and even erase the viewer’s subjectivity by virtue of their sheer psychological intensity, Francis’ vision returns it to the heart of the experience of looking at a painting: as the artist himself said, ‘The space at the centre of these paintings is reserved for you’ (S. Francis, quoted in Albert-Fernand Haelemeersch, ‘Sam Francis; Remembering’, in Sam Francis: Remembering, exh. cat., Museum Jan van der Togt, Amsterdam, 2004, p. 5).