Sam Francis’ solo show comprising works on paper opened on 27 February at Omer Tiroche Gallery in London. The gallery recently moved and it is one of the first shows in the new space, which feels more airy and accessible than the last. The exhibition spans four decades and each work is consistently inconsistent with the last. The variety is colour and technique showcase the artists’s range, delineating his transcontinental journey from California to Japan and back. The evening’s crowd was smart and discreet. We asked the audience, what’s your hot take?
HOT TAKE 1: Not my style. Just my personal taste. No. Nothing grabs me, really. The small one, maybe. A bit of interest there, but not much.
HOT TAKE 2: I like Japanese art. This is basically Japanese art, so…the style anyways.
would you have known it was Japanese art if they didn’t tell you?
I didn’t know the name of it, but yes. It’s not same as English art. We traditionally do grand vistas, and this sort of stuff is more modernist, in fact it’s traditional Japanese art. This looks like it’s been designed as a field of flowers.
HOT TAKE 3: I love Sam Francis, I’ve liked his stuff for many years. It’s good, very good. I like the layout and the colour. The curation is very clear. Nicely done. Lighting’s good too.
HOT TAKE 4: For me, I have found researching the show very interesting because Sam Francis had so many different layers to his life and he had so many different influences. Because he was so well traveled he put all those different cultural influences into his work, so to see them for the first time, to see the scale as well. Usually works on paper are a lot smaller and more discreet, but the fact that you have a scale that could be a canvas size as well, through me a little bit.
Most American artists were going to New York in the 1950s – he came to Paris and immersed himself in the culture there and then he ended up going to Japan to do a mural and fell in love with it. He ended up staying there for a very long time and started having a studio there. Whilst he was working there he was staying in a Buddhist temple and he was observing a lot of the Buddhists doing these flung ink techniques with the brushes. You can see that influence in the work, all the tachismes and the movement. When you watch videos of him painting he’s very much doing these big, gestural movements with all of the diluted ink and the acrylic. Because he got influenced by the Buddhist philosophy, they very much emphasise the element of white as representing the void, the infinite. The concept is that they’re not empty, but by creating this void he created a lot of depth to the work. It helps create a lot of movement and texture.
HOT TAKE 5: It is quite vibrant, isn’t it. Quite cheery. I can see Japanese influences in the pictures. They’re quite delicate as well. They’re kind of all different from each other. Even this one is very different. The paint is so thick on this. You know, he’s like, dripped it like this.
Colour is Light on Fire is on view through 2 June at Omer Tiroche Gallery
21 Conduit Street, First Floor
London, W1S 2XP
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