In Franklin Preston’s work, the absence of a real subject becomes the subject and when a subjecy is present, it is either kept secret or doesn’t have an implicit or latent message. Heightened by the unfinished quality and apathetic awkwardness of faded or incomplete fragments and scenes, this seemingly unplanned strategy allows the artist’s work to have no meaning at all while simultaneously putting alienation at the heart of it.

i love you but it seems i’ve chosen darkness, is a series of paintings that allude to thoughts about Weimar, Berlin, Dada and the absurd. Representation of abstract emotions and figuration, every now and then intersected with words, take turns in the artist’s visual vocabulary. Continuing the line-up of Preston’s overlapping pictorial systems, some of the paintings are basically elaborated line drawings out of which subject matter grows, like in those pieces characterized by heavy black lines, which seem to be quiet reflections on death.

Within a palette that usually tends toward the monochrome, Preston uses techniques such as cropping, framing and sequencing. When color is introduced, it is done showing a mastery of delicate, dreamlike color harmonies, which the artist uses to create flat, semiabstract compositions.

Some of the paintings create space between art and life, while others take on a loose episodic narrative touching on the countercultural or latent transgressiveness, implicit in underground gay culture throughout history.

More a collection of memories than joyful praise, Preston’s hauntingly vacant images put the viewer in a dark mood, a generalized sensation with an evocative effect that is much greater than the painting’s spare means.