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Lot Essay
Two balanced halves of kaleidoscopic colours burst and bloom across Sam Francis’ Erotic Arabesque. To the left, a smattering of golden daubs tesselate alongside capering slate and green, while ruby, blue and navy create spirals of diaphanous petals on the righthand side. Covering the entire composition are gossamer ribbons and multicoloured pearls which ebb and twist, united against a crystalline ground. Erotic Arabesque expresses Francis’ investment in an animated beauty, evident in the present work’s arcing, gestural forms. Painted in 1987, Erotic Arabesque is a stunning example of Francis’ chromatic mosaics. While Francis’ early works have a more restrained palette, he quickly turned to the possibilities of colour as a formal property, imbuing it with volume and depth. By the mid-1980s, his application of paint had become thicker and more resolute, evidence of his mastery of the material, and the works of this period explode with colour as if propelled by an internal velocity.
At the heart of Francis’ output was an investigation into the interplay between light and colour, which he saw as liberating forces: ‘I like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud,” he said, ‘but I am tied down to place. No matter where I am... it's always the same. Painting is a way in and out’ (Sam Francis quoted from P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 14). Born in California, Francis moved to Paris after completing his undergraduate studies; there he encountered paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet, artists who endeavoured to accurately arrest light on a canvas. In seeking to make colour emote and resonate, Matisse was an enduring inspiration for Francis. By reconfiguring Abstract Expressionism’s transcendental understanding of painting through the lens of Impressionist mechanics, Francis revealed a visual idiom uniquely his own and completely invested in the potential of colour. Within the dense vortices of Erotic Arabesque exists a similarly forceful luminosity and swirling atop the white ground Francis’ chromatic geometries exude an unbridled and empyrean energy. As he reflected in an interview with his friend, the curator Peter Selz, ‘I work in a circular, gyro-like manner—spiral, move to levels. So, I keep coming back to something from before, but approached from a completely different point of view. A rearrangement of the psyche’ (S. Francis quoted in D. Burchett-Lere (ed.), Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, p. 266).
At the heart of Francis’ output was an investigation into the interplay between light and colour, which he saw as liberating forces: ‘I like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud,” he said, ‘but I am tied down to place. No matter where I am... it's always the same. Painting is a way in and out’ (Sam Francis quoted from P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 14). Born in California, Francis moved to Paris after completing his undergraduate studies; there he encountered paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet, artists who endeavoured to accurately arrest light on a canvas. In seeking to make colour emote and resonate, Matisse was an enduring inspiration for Francis. By reconfiguring Abstract Expressionism’s transcendental understanding of painting through the lens of Impressionist mechanics, Francis revealed a visual idiom uniquely his own and completely invested in the potential of colour. Within the dense vortices of Erotic Arabesque exists a similarly forceful luminosity and swirling atop the white ground Francis’ chromatic geometries exude an unbridled and empyrean energy. As he reflected in an interview with his friend, the curator Peter Selz, ‘I work in a circular, gyro-like manner—spiral, move to levels. So, I keep coming back to something from before, but approached from a completely different point of view. A rearrangement of the psyche’ (S. Francis quoted in D. Burchett-Lere (ed.), Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, p. 266).