Detroit Art Review

Installation Cranbrook Art Museum, James Benjamin Franklin, Full Circle, 2022

In the color-saturated, exuberant and irregularly shaped paintings of James Benjamin Franklin’s solo show Full Circle, humble and often degraded fiber elements of domestic detritus are transformed by all means necessary into improbably beautiful contrivances for seeing and being. With this exhibition of 11 recent artworks, on view until March 19, 2023 at the Cranbrook Art Museum,  he has returned—full circle–to the campus where he earned an MFA in 2017 for his first solo museum show. A West Coast native now living and working in Detroit, Franklin has absorbed the influence of the city’s surfaces and structures and has now transformed those raw materials into a lush visual feast.

Aim, 2022, acrylic, fabric, plaster, sand, epoxy on extruded polystyrene, 82.5” x 79” x 3.25 photo: K.A. Letts

The paradox at the center of Franklin’s art practice is that he achieves these sumptuous effects while using the humblest of lowbrow materials. The artist creates his own eccentrically configured grounds from extruded epoxy and foam core, a process that takes several days and yields a flat shallow receptacle with raised edges. It’s a fictive playground of sorts for his highly idiosyncratic painted inventions. Into this sandbox-sized tray go thrift store fabrics, IKEA finds, blankets, bits of carpet, rugs and bathmats that form the underlying physical basis for the paintings. He also seems to have a particular affinity for crocheted afghans, lace doilies and other hand-crafted bric-a-brac. Next comes the audacious improvisational application of paint and glitter and sand and plaster in color combinations that vary considerably from artwork to artwork.

The resulting paintings balance esthetic refinement with the effect of a precocious child’s craft project. It’s evident that this is fully intended. “I needed to achieve the playfulness which was sitting at the back of my head,” Franklin said in a recent interview with Bomb magazine. “I want to get lost and get a sense of either joy or mystery in the work and all the materials that are used and just kind of all the things that are unexpected and surprising.”  Franklin credits the gritty urban environment of Detroit and a certain local DIY mentality for inspiration and he specifically cites the influence of the Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum.

We have the sense that as the artist continues to explore his improvised methods, he has become more confident in the capacity of his materials to convey the intended effect.  The paintings have become diaphanous and translucent, and the constituent parts are allowed to retain their identity while contributing to Franklin’s overall project.

Rise, 2022, acrylic, fabric, plaster, sand, glitter, and epoxy on extruded polystyrene, 5” x 79” x 3.25” photo: K.A. Letts

This is an artist who is willing to take risks, to experiment, and to trust his process and his vision. His painting, Rise, is emblematic of this self confidence.  Franklin depends on the physical roughness of the dimensional lacy fabrics to provide the formal substructure for a particularly offbeat composition. Dominated by the diamond shape in the lower, slightly left-of-center quadrant of the painting, Franklin softens its intrusive presence with varied shades of acid yellows and muddy pinks, plus a judicious sprinkling of metallic glitter. He has changed the orientation of the tray throughout the creative process, sometimes using gravity to move the paint and in other instances allowing the colors to puddle. Swooping yellow and green linear curves at the top quarter of the composition allow the irregular movement of the exterior shape to make inroads.  The spidery lace patterning at the top of the painting comes to the perceptual foreground while other elements are submerged by inchoate blobs of pigment. There is nothing programmatic; this process feels entirely intuitive.

Every visitor will have their own favorites among the paintings in this exhibition.  I was particularly charmed by his painting Be, where Franklin has allowed the native colors of the yellow and orange 1970s zigzag afghan at the top of the picture to participate in the interplay of the constituent elements, while sunny lines created by dry brushing carry an implied landscape across the imaginary horizon. Thickly applied blue glitter makes a starry lake at the bottom of painting. The whole thing seems both incredible and inevitable.

Be, 2022, acrylic, fabric, sand, glitter, epoxy on extruded polystyrene, 82.25” x 80” x 3.25” photo: K.A. Letts

Of course, this level of risk-taking can go wrong, and in Accord, Franklin’s experimentation with framed voids in the interior of the painting seem, to me at least, to be unsuccessful, as they stop the flow of the composition at awkward points. But Franklin’s chance-y explorations more often meet with consistent, lightning-in-a-bottle success.

Every painting in Full Circle has its own idiosyncrasies and difficult-to-quantify virtues, as well as its own internal color-logic. They share procedural and material elements, but through careful examination, we discover that each artwork represents a singular dialog between the artist’s imagination and his medium. There is a courting of potential surprise–and even disaster–in each one, yet time after time Franklin successfully produces exhilarating paintings that surprise and delight.

Retain, 2022, acrylic fabric, plaster, sand and epoxy on extruded polystyrene photo: K.A. Letts

Full Circle: James Benjamin Franklin @ Cranbrook Art Museum, through March 19, 2023

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Installation view of Robert Sestok: Space and Time at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through Dec. 17.

Many Detroiters may associate Cass Corridor veteran Robert Sestok most with his towering steel assemblages, simultaneously daunting and mesmerizing, found around downtown and Midtown as well as at his City Sculpture Park. But with Robert Sestok: Space and Time at the Simone DeSousa Gallery, the 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow reminds us that in addition to being a large-form sculptor, he’s also an adroit painter perfectly willing to break form and startle his audience.

Space and Time, up through Dec. 17, speaks to both talents. Your first impression on entering might be one of technicolor roadmaps, given the belts of strongly colored “brick paths” barreling across the three Origins canvases in the first gallery. It’s all a bit hallucinogenic. Picture the Yellow Brick Road on acid and you’re halfway there. Contributing to the visual drama is that these are big pieces – in the neighborhood of 11 feet by nine feet – and our view is seemingly from high above, as if peering down on three incredibly complex, colorful LA freeway interchanges superimposed on gray backgrounds covered with thin, dreamy dribblings of paint.

Robert Sestok, Origin #3, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 x 2 inches. (Courtesy Simone DeSousa Gallery.)

“This work reaches back to my early murals at the Duffy Company,” Sestok said, referring to the interior and exterior murals he created in 1971 at the behest of James Duffy, the collector and art patron who owned the warehouse at West Jefferson and Junction that housed his family’s steel-pipe business. (Duffy would later bequeath his outstanding Cass Corridor collection to Wayne State University.)

“When you walked in,” Sestok said of the warehouse, now leveled for the Gordy Howe International Bridge to Canada, “you’d see this huge pile of heavy steel pipes — and down the wall you’d see a mural of the pipes floating in space.”

The floating pipes were painted on concrete-block walls, and Sestok used the horizontal grout lines as a sort of hard-edged framing device for his lyrical circles. And there you can see the genesis, perhaps, of the bold linear stripes in Origins, underlining the artist’s habit of circling back to work made decades ago, pulling out old ideas and making them new again.

“I kind of shocked myself,” Sestok said. “I didn’t realize at first I was repeating something I’d done a long time ago. It just came out of me.”

Interior of the former Edward W. Duffy Co. steel-pipe warehouse near Fort Wayne, with Robert Sestok’s 1971 mural on the far wall. (Courtesy of the artist)

Sestok, who grew up in Birmingham, got his very first Detroit studio in 1967 with Gordon Newton in the Old Convention Hall near Wayne State University, a building that also housed other Corridor artists like John Egner, Michael Luchs, Brenda Goodman and Jim Chatelain. For his part, Sestok quickly developed a reputation for productivity – or, as critic Dennis A. Nawrocki’s put it in Essay’d, “the prime protagonist of the indefatigable do-it-yourself Detroit work ethic.”

(A good example of that ethic is Sestok’s one-man City Sculpture Park with about 30 works that went up in 2015 at the John Lodge Freeway Service Drive North and Alexandrine in Detroit, and came down in 2020. It was a striking gift to the city; those who’ve mourned its disappearance will be happy to learn that it’s been relocated a couple miles away to 3573 Farnsworth, just west of Mt. Elliott.)

Playing the role of midwife to the Cass Corridor movement was the formerly depressed neighborhood along Cass Avenue south of Wayne State – the sort of urban streetscape in the Sixties and Seventies where nervous suburbanites punched the gas pedal. In those years, the Corridor attracted dozens of young, artistic rebels with a collective attraction towards the gritty and the raw, and a bent for exploiting the city’s treasure trove of industrial detritus.

In spotlighting the work of this rowdy cohort, the movement’s principal exhibition space – the  Willis Gallery (where Avalon International Breads is today) — drew serious attention from Sam Wagstaff, curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as coastal art elites, who started paying attention to the Motor City for the first time in decades. (Indeed, there are some, Sestok included, who argue the Corridor represents the only actual artistic movement the city’s ever generated.)

“The art was kind of fast and furious,” Sestok told The Detroit News in an interview 10 years ago, “with people in competition with each other to get their work in the gallery and have a show. It was an exciting time.”

Robert Sestok, Origin #1, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 132 x 111 x 2 inches. (Courtesy Simone DeSousa Gallery)

 “Fast and furious” isn’t a bad description for Origins Nos. 1-3, cited above, all of which are three-step constructions. First Sestok poured and pushed (in some cases with a leaf-blower) thick gray paint to form the substructure, with a second layer of colorful, whimsical dribblings enlivening the surface. On top of that composition, and blotting out most of it, he laid down the severe, multicolored geometric pathways.

Intriguingly, the simply titled Origin in the gallery’s back room inverts this hierarchy. Here the geometric checkerboard is overlaid with thin, circular vortices and a drizzled white line that meanders, taking its time, all across the canvas. In some ways it’d be interesting to see Origin installed between two of the front-room pieces, rather than segregating it. The contrast in aesthetics, and the clear inversion in design, would be bracing.

Robert Sestok, Origin, 2022 Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 53 x 2 inches. (Courtesy Simone DeSousa Gallery)

 Completing the show are several works, somewhat smaller than the exclamation points in the first gallery, that also lean heavily on geometry, but in a completely different fashion. Origins Nos. 4-6 feature something like gridworks of colored squares and rectangles – sharp and exact, as if cut into the white backgrounds with an X-Acto knife.

They are, it must be said, in many ways quite beautiful. “Yeah,” said Sestok, “if you can get away from the wallpaper idea.”

Robert Sestok, Origin #6, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 53 x 2 inches. (Courtesy Simone DeSousa Gallery)

 Robert Sestok: Space and Time will be up through Dec. 17 at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery.

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