Sam Szafran (1934–2019) occupies a unique place in contemporary French painting and drawing, where "the staircase" became an obsessive and recurring motif in his work. Born into a family history marked by exile and war, he imbued these transitional structures with a powerful autobiographical charge: his staircases are not mere backdrops but places of wandering, memory, and isolation, where vertigo and intimacy intertwine.

His work is distinguished by a refined technical mastery of pastel, with which he creates dense and luminous surfaces where perspective is deliberately distorted.

Szafran's staircases express the movement of the gaze and create a sensation of falling or spiraling… The precision of his line and the richness of his textures transform this commonplace setting into an almost fantastical vision.

On an aesthetic and symbolic level, the staircase becomes for Szafran a metaphor for passage, ascent and fall, but also an intimate narrative within an architecture of everyday life.

“The feeling of emptiness, of vertigo, is the strongest sensation I have ever experienced. This perhaps explains why my drawings always deal with vertigo, and why, often, when faced with my subject, I am terrified by the pull of the void.”
(Interview with Sam Szafran by Connaissance des Arts Magazine)

Thus, his “obsessions” with studios, greenhouses, vegetation, and, above all, staircases have structured his entire body of work and have been exhibited in several museum retrospectives.