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Broadway is pleased to announce Primary our second solo exhibition with Detroit artist
James Benjamin Franklin.
Known for his non-conforming paintings incorporating cast-resin substrates which are
invaded by found textiles and a cavalcade of pigments, glitter and sand, Franklin
pushes this new body of work into an uncharted territory of asymmetry and textural
adventurousness.
The paintings’ shapes—ranging from fluttering, destabilized rhomboids to what might
be described as demented shamrocks—foreground the importance of hard line, and a
well-defined perimeter in the work. This is arrived at via a skillful, if skewed,
draftsmanship that is carefully pre-planned in numerous preparatory drawings.
By painstakingly layering his unique supports with paint that is alternately sprayed,
poured, scraped and squeegeed across the more orderly geometry and dimensional
relief of the inlaid fabrics, Franklin walks a thin line between a sure hand and material
uncertainty.
Similarly, the bicameral friction created between the perfected, monochromatic
contours of the sinuous frame and the chewy, accident-prone abandon of the variably
absorbent interior is central to these paintings’ power. This tension emphasizes the
collision of exactitude and improvisation that is at the heart of his work.
Despite its declarative title, Primary does not propose a return to origins so much as it questions
whether such a condition can be recovered at all. Franklin’s surfaces read as accumulations—
built, obscured, and revised—where earlier states persist beneath successive interventions. What might be understood as “primary” is not a fixed beginning, but something unstable: buried within the work, partially visible, and continually redefined through process. In this sense, the paintings resist purity, instead locating their force in the tension between emergence and erasure.
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