What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Philaris’s bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’–that is ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’
Søren Kierkegaard
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present The Poet’s Lips, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Derek Franklin in our second gallery. Continuing his previous investigations into the visual presentation systems of information and ideas, Franklin has moved away from the darker palette of shadows and turned his focus to the light of too much seeing—overexposure, the startled eye, memory caught in a spotlight mid-formation that then dissipates. The paintings are awash in light, wavering between emergence and erasure, where recognition begins to deliquesce at its edges.
Franklin’s new works offer and then withhold gratification at different distances, slowing down and rendering uncertain the act of looking. Franklin writes, “I hope to make paintings that are never fully resolute—paintings you can never quite be completely at home with when you are standing in front of them.” The paintings hold oppositions instead of resolving them, seeking potential in the ambiguity between oscillating poles: specificity and the pedestrian, hope and anguish, memory and its forgetting. They sustain attention toward the friction between everyday imagery and the fantasy that an image has the possibility of bearing memory.
The Poet’s Lips also includes new sculptures by Franklin, The Songs That Enkidu Would Sing. Echoing the layers of information and meaning in his paintings, these sculptures are an homage to Brancusi’s The Endless Column, fashioned from cast bronze recorders. The instrument—that educational staple and entry point to music for children—becomes a small theater of self-actualization and protest: obedience to the score, or an awkward assertion of one’s own?
The sculptures reflect the artist’s view that music’s role is not neutral but central to the founding of rituals, fears, and myths—music as seductive, manipulative, solemn, or celebratory: a siren’s lure, the Pied Piper’s call, a harp vigil for passage into the afterlife, Kokopelli’s heralding of spring, and the fear for children’s safety. The column gathers these possibilities into a repeating ascent, where education shades into rebellion and myth into ceremony, all the while maintaining a fidelity to the internal light of the paintings.
