Sinchi Medicina
Sala Diaz, San Antonio
- Lawrence Jennings -
David and Daniel Frank, wall paintings from Sinchi Medicina, 2010; with Chavin Eagle, 2007 (right); acrylic on canvas;
36 x 48 inches; photo by Lawrence Jennings
On a blog chronicling their road trip to San Antonio from New York, twin brothers David and Daniel Frank posted photos of themselves jumping on their beds during a stay at a Holiday Inn. “Rambunctious” might be a good word to describe the feeling of these pictures, as well as the artists’ creative output. Arriving in town with over fifty paintings, the brothers spent the next six days transforming Sala Diaz’ walls, corners and doorways into an all-out color fest.
In the gallery’s entry room the Frank brothers created three prominent wall paintings displaying the radial symmetry of mandalas. The largest of these murals, painted in crisp diagonal yellow and orange bands, provided a sunburst backdrop for a David Frank canvas hung in the center of the wall. Entitled Chavín Eagle, this painting appears to depict Mesoamerican stelae but is actually based on a stone sculpture from the Chavín civilization that prospered high in the central Andes around 1000 BCE. Indeed, Chavín artifacts that portray supernatural jaguars, serpents and caimans, as well as shamans and the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus, figure prominently in many of the brothers’ vibrant paintings. Refreshingly, neither artist uses these subjects as representations of ancient culture. Instead, the Frank brothers, who also go by the enigmatic moniker COSMOCTO, bring Chavín aesthetics to new life by abstracting the designs as templates upon which they freely elaborate, adding bright acrylic colors, complex patterns and their mystical-artistic whimsy.
COSMOCTO’s acts of benign irreverence multiply feverishly in the gallery hallway where the brothers hung a grid of twelve small wood-panel paintings, each presenting an image of a smiling skull with hearts in its eyes and stars on its forehead. The brothers painted the wall holding the panels a bright canary yellow and then stenciled or silkscreened twenty-eight more skull images in fluorescent magenta, turquoise and orange on top. The complete shrinelike installation, which also includes candles on a prayer cloth-covered shelf, evokes the eerie feeling of encountering the site of some unknown rainbow death cult.
Daniel Frank, Timeless Machine, 2009; acrylic on maple; 24 x 24 inches; photo by Lawrence Jennings
Spiritual iconography—sacred geometry, in particular—features heavily in much of COSMOCTO’s offerings in Sinchi Medicina. Instead of fixating on one religious tradition, the brothers include images of everything, from Taoist yin-yang symbols and Pythagorean forms to Hindu yantras and Buddhist mandalas. In perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling work, Daniel Frank’s Timeless Machine, six-pointed stars, or hexagrams, radiate out from the center of the square canvas. Concentric circles, hexagons and additional square frames penetrate the edges of the star shapes to give the dizzying effect of an Islamic arabesque. Sinchi Medicina also features quirky sculptural elements, such as small ladders, an upside-down figure “standing” on the ceiling and an incense tray, but the paintings prove far more interesting in their formal complexity and craftsmanship.
Sinchi Medicina, taken in its totality, functions as a lively amalgamation of mystical imagery from across the globe and an intoxicating visual elixir. It is rumored that COSMOCTO will have a “second coming,” returning to Sala Diaz in the near future for another act. Let’s hope they bring more of their restless magic.
Lawrence Jennings is an artist who teaches visual art at San Antonio College.
This exhibition will be on view through July 25th.