“Color in a way is a receptacle for a feeling and a way for you to hold it until understanding arrives or meaning is extracted.”
A rresting in its courage and simplicity, Untitled is a prime example of Sam Francis’s late work, a period of the artist’s career characterized by both unbridled experimentation and poignant introspection. Working the canvas with deliberate marks and magnetic confidence, Francis visually synthesizes the vast range of influences he accrued throughout his decades-long practice, resulting in a captivating tableau of zen-like balance and true painterly intuition. Breaking free from the artist's gridded all-over matrices of the 1970s, the present work, with its pools of rich red paint framed by a unique round canvas, reflects Francis’s longt.mes fascination with the circle as a biomorphic cellular form and a signifier for endless potential. The latter symbolic reading is inspired by the teachings of Carl Jung, which the artist closely studied. Francis identified particularly closely with the Jungian belief that the act of drawing geometric mandalas could mentally and spiritually center oneself; to this end, he created numerous “mandala” paintings of concentric circles and squares that are hypnotic in their vibrant arrangements of color and line.
Like many of his Color Field contemporaries, Francis looked to the European art historical tradition, taking cues from figures such as Monet, Bonnard and Matisse when developing his luminous and emotive treatment of color. However, it was ultimately the art, culture, and philosophy of Japan that left the most profound impression on Francis. In 1957, he traveled to the country for the first t.mes and spent the year living and working out of a temple in Tokyo. There, he studied the arts of haboku splashed-ink painting and ikebana flower arranging, and befriended artists such as Jiro Yoshihara, who founded the radical Gutai group, and prominent Japanese dealers including Kusuo Shimizu. Crucially, it was also in Japan that he encountered the artistic concept of ma, which refers to the conscious use of negative space to imbue an entire composition with “an emptiness full of possibilities.” Indeed, Francis’s use of blank space is masterful; in his hands, the color white becomes both a tool for heightening the intensity of his vivid hues, and a symbolic signifier of silence, spirituality and the void.
“On his first visit to Japan, Francis experienced a sense of déjà vu, a return to the nontraditional, and felt very much at home there. . . . In turn, Japan, with a tradition that considers art, above all, as meditative experience, almost immediately responded with sympathy to Francis’ work.”
Created three decades after this formative first trip to Japan, the present work reveals the lasting legacy of these cultural and aesthetic tenets in Francis’s oeuvre. His approach to stroke, texture, and hue are liberatory but refined, revealing his adroit understanding of compositional space and visual weight. Crimson blooms are juxtaposed over an electric blue rivulet—a stark and pristine arrangement that translates the poetics of nature and spirituality onto canvas in a manner that is bold yet surprisingly minimalistic. Yet at the same t.mes , an undercurrent of pulsing energy runs through this introspective scene; needle-like flecks of blood-red paint radiate out toward the canvas’s pristine extremities, allowing the viewer to deduce the glorious gestural motions that came so naturally to Francis in his working process.
