Lot 503 D

Sam Francis uses colour as a theme to develop a variety and range of expression to the extent of extreme contradictions. In his white paintings at the beginning of the 1950s, for example, he sometimes reduced the paint to almost nothing and applied it thinly to the canvas in biomorphic forms similar to blotches. The viewer is magically attracted by this vibrating brilliance and experiences the power of these few traces of colour in the white natural-stone-like formations, which float on the canvas in subtle movement and condense to one body. An association with glowing lava is no coincidence, transporting in its intense heat all sorts of minerals from the depths of the earth in molten lumps. Sam Francis connects with colours light over fire - “Color is light on fire” - i.e. the highest form of energy.

Trained as an artist in Berkeley, California, Sam Francis soon moved to France. He studied in Paris at the Académie Fernand Léger and spent the summers in Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne's hometown. This stay changes his palette, the fine pale tones soon give way to intense blue, red, and black tones that extend over the paper like a finely woven framework and create a connecting order in the surfaces. For the viewer, they are an encounter with the impression of planned precision and corresponding coincidence; Sam Francis disseminates the confident feeling of watercolours radiating life, the unfailing feeling for an interplay between dimension, colour, and composition. Dripped areas of colour in net-like connections form the uneven net between which the colours 'float' on the paper like water lilies on a pond. 'Chaos' with different forces conveys ideas about space, ideas about matter, ideas about colour.