Untitled, after Adagio for Strings (Barber); acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 in.

Despite current notions about professional specialization in the arts--as in every field of endeavor--people are more complex than capitalistic worker bees. Aural and visual sensitivity often cohabit within the same temperaments, complementing each other instead of combating. Giorgione, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, and Ingres are only a few members of a very long roster of artist-musicians of various levels of proficiency (Although Ingres, who drew divinely, played the violin execrably). Some artists have explored the relationship deliberately. Synesthetics like Kandinsky, who claimed to "see" musical tones as colors, irresistibly created visual analogs of melodies or chords. For their part, artistically inclined musicians from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries designed color-displaying organs that would "illustrate" their scores. Their electronic-wizard successors today have completely smudged the lines between disciplines, creating multimedia pieces that would have been technologically unimaginable only a few generations ago.

Ed Franco's abstract acrylic paintings may not pulse, flash, and morph like light shows or car-stereo graphic equalizers, but their musical sources are clearly expressed in their titles, Untitled after Firebird (Stravinsky) being a typical example. He pays homage to Mozart, Dvorak, Grofe, Smetana, Barber, Cage, Reich, Carter, and even TThe Gypsy Kings.

Music lovers will have fun here. Those less familiar (as I am) may feel slightly guilt-ridden, and culturally unprepared to understand these works. As a consolation, however, we can enjoy the paintings as latter-day Abstract Expressionism in the Still, Motherwell, and Rothko mold: improvised painted or collaged forms set against flat but modulated fields to poetic effect. Franco's paintings are determinedly anti-contemporary. if we consider current esthetic fashion of conceptualist and scientific methodology married to emotional ambiguity. In this age of surrogates and simulacra, Franco's paintings aim at and achieve handmade artistic authenticity instead. For those of us who try to consider culture as a long-term enterprise, who believe that painting and music can endure and must prevail, it's a welcome interruption in the regularly scheduled programming -- and a reminder to listen as well as look.

Work by Ed Franco was on view at the University of California Berkeley Extension Downstairs Gallery in San Francisco from June 22 through July 10, 2009.