“Color is a series of harmonies, everywhere in the universe being divine, whole numbers lasting forever, adrift in t.mes . . . . And the last words will be those of the stars.”
T here is a fundamental restlessness in Sam Francis’s Untitled. Executed in 1988, it is an exemplar of the deliberately experimental nature of the gestural master’s late period, with its vivid, thrumming surface interlaced and knotted over with a frenetic web of black brushwork that bleeds into watery clouds of deep green and blue. As Francis’s health declined and he was forced to reckon with mortality after the passing of two of his closest friends, his brushwork became more intense and frenzied and his palette took on a visceral quality with its deep and earthy hues, calling to mind Jackson Pollock’s allover experimentation with pouring and dripping paint, as well as the hypnotic swirling strokes of Van Gogh’s landscapes. In the years before Francis’s passing in 1994, the poetic visual symphonies he developed early in his career become unmoored and give way to an unprecedented urgency that seems to rise up out of some primordial abyss.
After spending the first half of his life traveling the world—he split his t.mes between New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Bern—Francis eventually settled in California, where he opened a new seaside studio and residence near the dramatic vistas of Point Reyes. The West Coast landscape soon found its way into Francis’s art; many of his later paintings, including the present work, incorporate fields of lush emerald green that conjure the foliage of Northern California’s forests. Untitled also hints at Francis’s unprecedented late-career investigation into elements of figuration. While his work remained perpetually rooted in abstraction, in the late 1980s he began incorporating recognizable shapes—a cross, eye, lip, or hand—into his prolific output of paintings and lithographs. Disembodied and pared down to their simplest essences, these forms swirl in and out of focus, embedded deep within Francis’s distinctive matrix of painted splatters and drips.
In Untitled, Francis eschews his characteristic use of negative space, instead filling the background of the painting with a thicket of dark, branchlike forms. Like the colossal trunk of a redwood tree, a thick red bar surges up across the middle of the composition. Its surface teems with a churning, almost lavalike mass of dark pockmarks that seem to swirl within the painting—a test.mes nt to Francis’s unparalleled ability to harness the medium of paint to create uncanny and endlessly evocative textures and tableaux. His understated approach to figuration comes into sharper focus as well: crowned with an oval of thick purple paint, the looming scarlet shape also conjures the form of a hulking human body whose head is bowed under an unspoken troubled psychological weight. The figure is boxed in from edge to edge of the composition, creating a subtle unease characteristic of Francis’s late works, which convey the artist’s turn toward a heightened inner turmoil and rawness of emotion.
