By Stephanie Synder
Perhaps it's the bright and cloud-like whiteness of their surfaces or their looming verticality that imbues Derek Franklin's newest oil paintings with an atmosphere of foggy spiritual luminosity. The whiteness that Franklin has achieved doesn't possess the patches of yellow warmth we expect from the sun, for instance, as it caresses the face on a summer morning. It is cool but not clinical. This white is astral and cosmic, like salt, or the chalky pigment created by the anonymous makers of Tantric meditation paintings across generations.
These are the thoughts that flooded my mind as I absorbed Derek Franklin's recent paintings in his one-person exhibition The Poet's Lips at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Franklin borrowed the show's evocatively embodied title from Danish philosopher and Christian existentialism founder Søren Kierkegaard's 1843 Either/Or. Still widely influential, Kierkegaard espouses a romantic vision of the poet's lips as a tortured yet magical threshold. Franklin includes a quote from the philosopher in which he reveals the origins of poetry as an Orphic phenomenon, born in an ancient Greek torture device, that transforms the poet's suffering into beauty as it exits the poet's body into the light of day and poetic language. It's this sensorium of light, in all of its painterly and lyric radiance, that propels these sensitive works of art into communion with the viewer.
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