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Red in Red

A six-and-a-half foot square oil painting by Sam Francis in 1955,  Red in Red , resembles a close-up view of the pastel red flesh of a cut-through grapefruit and the packed-together pulp  kernels inside. Sliced in-half and alike in size, the kernels seem to have negotiated their exact  shapes and boundaries individually with the neighbors that surround them. A yellow-tan strip resembling the skin of a grapefruit and a ragged white strip resembling the inside of the peel  appear in the upper left corner of the painting. Another ragged white strip runs along the  underside of the pink fleshy zone, which occupies about three fourths of the height of the  painting and spans the width.

Red in Red doesn’t quite make sense as a grapefruit, though. The colors wouldn’t be out of  place at a sunset. The fleshy area could as well be the fractured surface of a playa or a dry lake bed. Or it might be the cellular substructure of a biological organ or other tissue seen through a microscope. The yellow-tan portion of the peel like-segment in the upper left looks to be made  of kernels like the flesh. That’s unlike a grapefruit, no matter how you slice it.

Within and standing nearly the full height of the fleshy zone is a large gray area shaped like  Florida–or like a downward pointing pinky–just right of the center of the painting. As much as  anything else about Red in Red, it tempts and defies  identification. The pink pulp latticework of  the flesh extends right through the finger zone, but is paler and less distinct than elsewhere. It might be a patch of disease, a spill or a geologic inclusion–particularly since cells along the  perimeter seem simply inside or outside. But you might notice in a few places the boundary glancingly cuts across a few of them. So is this a filmy, transparent fragment laying on top of the  flesh–like a scrap of the membrane surrounding grapefruit sections? “It could be that,” Francis will have you thinking, if only for a moment.

It seems, he wants you thinking a lot.