FRANKLIN EVANS | MOTHERS OF INVENTION

"‘Feminism is no longer univocal’, art historian Jeanne Willette notes. ‘Feminism has become a movement of many voices, male and female, Western and non-Western.’ Today, artists of both genders making abstract work are deeply indebted to the pioneering contributions of the female abstract painters who preceded them. In a postmodern art world, 21st-century artists can draw from any number of sources, many of which came out of feminist innovations - including Performance art, Process art, a multiperspectival approach to artmaking, the use of unorthodox materials and means and reimagined craft. Unlike so many of these women painters working abstractly who had an ambivalent relationship with the pulls of pure abstraction and content, these artists use abstraction to explore the explicitly political and the deeply personal. While this reflects postmodern tendencies and styles, it is also deeply indebted to feminism for its objection to established hierarchies and rigid rules. 

This is certainly true for Franklin Evans (b. 1967) who sees, in the push and pull between abstraction and representation, a way to deal with biographical issues such as queer identity, his Mexican heritage on his mother’s side, his life as an artist and his background in economics and finance. ‘My work has a strong relationship to the aspect of feminism that challenges the white cisgendered heterogenerative patriarchal position of modernist painting/abstraction.’ Evans says, ‘My work as queer and absorptive uses the powerful impulses and visual knowledge of modernism’.

Each contiguous installation is an extension of his studio practice and continued exploration of what he sees as his ‘brain space’. Evans is not only a cannibal of other artists but dismantles and reassembles his own work for each successive installation. The cacophony of visual images in any exhibition can include traditional paintings on canvas; floor to ceiling screens made from painter’s tape; press releases from other art shows; art books; paint cans; faux Polaroids of friends or trompe l’oeil paintings of Polaroids and homages to an entire litany of artists from Caspar David Friedrich and Henri Matiss to Donald Judd and Frank Stella. Recently, Evans has looked to the work of Pat Steir. She is, he says, ‘now powering several of my paintings as I collapse her forceful drip onto my imagistic paintings - as a sort of dance among process, abstraction, and image memory’. He sees in Helen Frankenthaler a connection to the way he uses the floor to make some of the work, the staining of the canvas and paper, but also the way the floor is an important element of his installations. 

Evans acknowledges his debt to feminist art practices, noting:

The awareness that the specificity of singularity is contingent upon the forces surrounding it (history of patriarchy, colonialism - both the gains and losses of each). I tend to draw from the gains, but I also see that this lens is tied to feminism in its powerful grasp of agency. Feminism grabs the situations and negates, expands and creates from a new vantage. It is multivalent. It employs the history of otherness as a force, materially, perspectivally, imagistically, abstractly.

Early on, Evans was inspired by Judy Pfaff’s expansion of painting into an abstract field to realize his own paintings in the third dimension. While Pfaff’s use of materials - pigment, canvas - was familiar to Evans, it was the way she pulled them apart and into an environment that he connected to, and it is the reason he now describes his own work as ‘painting installations’. His environments are ‘othered’, a place to enter, a way to experience time and space. The paintings are worlds within worlds, psychedelic without a single-point perspective. A recent incarnation of Evans’s ongoing explorations entitled perpetualstudio (2022) commissioned by MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome, as part of the exhibition What a Wonderful World (2022) allowed him to increase the experience to even a grander scale."