PIASA is holding on Wednesday December 8th a Modern and Contemporary Art auction. Composed of 47 lots, this sale is focused on a very selective choice of works, produced between the late 1950s and the present day. One of the highlights of the sale is a watercolor and oil pastel on silk by the artist Sam Szafran, based on the figure of his wife, Lilette, here posing "among the philodendrons".
Since the beginning of the Renaissance, art and thought have been successively preoccupied with the nature of things, then with the sensations, and finally with the ideas. It is the realization of external reality that motivates the entire work of Sam Szafran (1934-2019). We find this creative determination in the various series he has produced: Workshops, Greenhouses, Portraits, Stairs, Plants. There is a form of metaphysical commitment that pushes him irreparably towards the absolute and allows him to paint the same subject over and over again without exhausting it. He does not seek to create works of art, but to demonstrate that creation remains an open process. His space is that of meditation, that of intimate life, a microcosm where even the silhouette of Lilette, his wife, almost disappears in the profusion of foliage that imposes its broad leaves like a plant cascade whose roots fall in tight ropes.
Oppressive greenhouse, broth of culture, unbreathable environment where expresses itself a vegetable nature in perpetual growth. We fall into a world of anamorphic deformation. We are taken by the vertigo of nonsense by the realism of an image which does not oppose the subjective comments of the treated subject. It seems that Lilette parmi les philodendrons is one of the most mysterious and accomplished works of this series. There is an urgency on the part of Sam Szafran, a desire to take his work to the depths of things, while knowing that things have no depth. This imperious need forces him to search in the hope of reaching the unattainable. Image of a subconscious at the same time appeased and tragic which is inscribed in the icy light of a day which does not vary, always equal, lucid and cold as the conscience. Unity of sight which is added to the abundance of the visible, to the regulation of the glance, to the pullulation of the organism, to the photosynthesis of the matter, the organic and the spiritual. The body enters in resonance with the world by the tricking of the work which allows this agreement and the maintenance. There is work only when there is a resonance of a meaning with the world. Isolated, repeated, declined, the Greenhouses in their banality take a strange, disturbing, obsessive aspect. One is worried about this faculty to make emerge the magic and the anguishing from the everyday
Sam Szafran (1934-2019)
Lilette parmi les philodendrons, 2009
Estimate: 150 000 / 200 000 €
It is through the extraordinary and unusual marriage of watercolor and volatile pigment, that an impression of saturation is affirmed where wandering is sumptuously transfigured. Sensitivity of the skinned, feeling of excess, threat of infinity, fascination of the instability of space, this work Lilette parmis les philodendrons, by its treatment, the precision of its drawing, the winding of the roots, the expansionism of the growth as a carnivorous vegetal overpopulation from the same trunk, plunges us by its very precision, into the throes of unrealism and the threat of strangulation. A space devouring tree dominating the frail, calm and serene feminine figure, who undoubtedly knows that the Philodendron was a Friend-Tree for the Greeks.
