Since the beginning of the Renaissance, art and thought have been successively concerned with the nature of things, then of sensations, and finally of ideas. It is the realisation of external reality that motivates the entire work of Sam Szafran (1934-2019). One find this creative determination in the various series that he has produced: Workshops, Greenhouses, Portraits, Stairs and Plants. There is a form of metaphysical commitment that pushes him irrevocably 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 one of meditation, 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.
An oppressive greenhouse, a breeding ground, an unbreathable environment where a plant life in perpetual growth expresses itself. We are plunged into a world of anamorphic distortion. One is taken by the vertigo of nonsense by the realism of an image which does not oppose to the subjective comments about the subject treated.
Lilette parmi les philodendrons, 2009
Watercolor and oil pastel on silk mounted on panel
It seems that Lilette parmi les philodendrons is one of the most mysterious and accomplished works in this series. There is an urgency on the part of Sam Szafran, a desire to take his work to the very depths of things, while knowing that things are shallow. This compelling need urges him to search, hoping for the unattainable. An image of a subconscious that is both appeased and tragic, which is inscribed in the icy light of a day that does not vary, is always equal, lucid and cold as consciousness. Unity of vision which is added to the abundance of the visible, to the regulation of the gaze, to the pullulation of the organism, to the photosynthesis of matter, of the organic and the spiritual. The body enters into resonance with the world through the work, which allows this harmony and maintains it. There is only a work when there is a resonance of a meaning with the world. Isolated, repeated and declined in their banality, the Greenhouse Workshops take on a strange, disturbing and obsessive aspect. One is worried about this ability to make the magical and the distressing emerge from the everyday.
It is through the extraordinary and unusual marriage of watercolour and volatile pigment that an impression of saturation is created, where wandering is sumptuously transfigured. One is plunged into its very precision, the throes of unrealism and the threat of strangulation by the sensibility of the skinned, by the feeling of excess, by the threat of infinity, by the fascination of the instability of space, by this work Lilette parmi les philodendrons, by its treatment, by the precision of its drawing, by the winding of the roots, by the expansionism of the growth as a carnivorous vegetal overpopulation from the same trunk. A tree that devours space, dominating the frail, calm and serene female figure, who no doubt knows that the Philodendron was a friendly tree for the Greeks.
