Sherron Francis's current exhibition at Lincoln Glenn comprises a selection of the artist's paintings made between 1977 and '83 and evinces the artist's trajectory towards a singular mode of painting that marks her apart from other Color Field painters. Take, for example, the untitled painting from 1977. Here, the red-stained substrate surface is overpainted in a darker, grainy, purplish red that occupies and cleaves frontally to most of the picture plane in a loose flow. It recalls a pressed flower or ice cream dropped from a cone to the street. The paint contains sand, and as it dried, it separated, creating beautiful, but also workmanlike or quotidian effects. The surface now recalls an aging painted door or the neglected blacktop of a side road. Niceties are forgone; in their place is a tactile and optical subtlety that remains direct and unfussy.
Francis combines a range of unpredictable color relations and light-sensitive surface effects that stand apart from the once-vaunted and later-overlooked genre of (mostly) New York City-based Color Field painting. Within this particular context, a painter that comes to mind is Peter Bradley-like Francis, he was exhibited by André Emmerich in the 1970s. Both artists share a natural boldness in the selection and use of material that doesn't prevent them from emphasizing, above all else, color as a perceptual phenomenon without which there is simply no world to engage with.
During the 1980s, Francis distanced herself from the art world and acquired a property adjacent to the sea on the North Fork of Long Island. The sand from her beach entered her paintings, as did industrial-grade gravel. Untitled (1979) is a narrowly vertical canvas measuring 65 by about 32 inches. The rough accretion of dark blue and green paint that occupies the left side of the painting appears to contain gravel (the caption lists only "mixed media") that endows it with a physical weight and optical light that contrasts with the fluid stains of cream and paler blue to the right. Just looking at the way in which these two areas of colored material meet and become an edge around the painting's physical limit is a thrill. Bear in mind, too, the deep ocean and the land's sandy edge, as well as the weather-rain, cloud, shifting coastal light.
Doubling (1983) is one of several paintings here that surprise when viewed at an angle. But after all, why should we view such works only as frontal images? The silver pigmented gel that Francis has applied to this painting by squeegee throws a shadow like a wide incision as it displaces more viscous paint: a visceral approach to paint and surface like something we might find in the work of a laboring plasterer. Combined with such nuanced color, this directness is exciting.
Ultimately, Francis's work reminds me less of the artists one usually finds associated with Color Field painting than of figures like Jean Dubuffet. Hubert Damisch described how Dubuffet worked within the substrate of his materially rich paintings: the image becomes the skin of an embodied world. Similarly, the layered blue-green thickness of a 1979 untitled work and the glimpses Francis gives, through the strata of paint, to the stained canvas beneath recalls for me some of Simon Hantaï's paintings from the late '50s, as well as the freeness of thrown and scattered paint that Joan Mitchell's work from the same years demonstrates.
These observations are from Peter Schjeldahl's review of a Francis exhibition at André Emmerich Gallery in 1973: "paintings stained and brushed to a suavely grainy texture, each float an area of warm, soft color in a somewhat less-intensely colored field." In the years that followed this description, the range of feeling in Francis's work deepened toward a less lyrical and more somber beauty with no loss of facility or subtlety. Anomalous, perhaps, within a general conception of the preoccupations of Color Field painting, Francis refused any arbitrary boundaries and pursued instead an entirely distinct, challenging, and sensuous direction for her work.
