Franklin Collao

FLUX FORMA
October 11, 2025

What draws you in, seduces you in a typical Franklin Collao painting is its inherent indiscernibility – unreadability. His ostensible subjects are light and color, the universal motifs of abstract painting – but whereas abstraction has traditionally veered in the direction of either a total openness/gestural/landscape approach (think, for instance, of Joan Mitchell) or else a radical flattening/declination of the field altogether, often reduced to color paneling (as in the work of Peter Halley), Collao has built his own space; if I had to give it a name, I would call it a phenomenalist approach to abstraction. For his paintings appear as documentation of some mysterious happening at once astral and molecular; beams of colored light jutting out from some unseen, unknowable force that is perhaps as potent as the sun, and yet probably not belonging to any sphere of existence with which we are intimately familiar. In recent works, these spherical forms, which often manifest in letter- or graffito-like shapes, are interlaced with crystalline splatterings that seem to glow – alien sperm, perhaps – or else laser-esque beams jutting forth from their father forms.

Collao’s work serves as a startling addition to the emergent canon of Queer Abstraction, although it has few parallels to its historical precedents in this vein. The artist has developed his own painting technique in which no brushstrokes or marks are visible anywhere on the canvas, leading some to speculate that he is working with spray-paint. In fact, these works are all done in oils, though applied with large brushes on unprimed canvas, creating a sense of softness, of endlessness. In Collao’s expansive visual universes, there is no such thing as an ending or a beginning; all is sensate, without borders, motion and flow. Collao gives us a new, superflat version of the sublime, as ephemeral as it is engulfing.

- Travis Jeppesen