Perhaps the greatest gift language offers is the opportunity to be colloquial. Consider, for example, how many ways we use metaphors to convey the idea of storytelling: spin a yarn; follow a thread; string a tale together. And every story needs its hero. Someone who conquers, who overcomes, who persists against the odds, the elements, the obstacles. Or, to borrow from screenwriter Raynold Gideon, “The hero is only as good as the opposition he is facing.” At times, these forces may seem unsurmountable. Delrico Gibson proved that there is no such thing.

Colors of Love invites us to take a few, tentative steps along his hero’s journey. Five works, joined as much by meaning as by medium, challenge viewers to pause, to contemplate, to explore. Consider Colors of Love and Mo Colors of Love, both from 2021. Made to a soundtrack of No Escape, Parts I and II, by English composer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Hardcastle, each captures a sense of infinity, each a tale of a vanishing point that would fall on the horizon were it not pushing itself upward into space. One of the truly beautiful aspects of his work is how they are forever pulsing, pushing forward into space in inevitable and insistent moments of touch.

And as Colors of Love pulls us in, Mo Colors of Love pushes us forward. Gibson’s innate sense of movement ensures that nothing is ever static, stuck, paused. Instead, the vibrance of his palette is mirrored in the vitality of his surfaces. And that movement is as physical as it is pictorial. Gibson’s works are as much about love as they are connection. There’s that bold, bright red in Levels of Passion, as if there were only one level for passion and it is intense. But the levels are written around, not on, the surface. His levels build, climb, push up, pulse…literally, the lights a luminescence coursing in and across the surface. Gibson suggests there is no limit to his passion, and invites us to believe there are no limits to ours, either.

There’s also his commitment to faith and strength. Gibson connects I Got This (2021) with Fred Hammond’s gospel song, Jesus Build a Fence Around Me, going so far as to create a visual and literal fence, one object – a rectangle – set inside another – a diamond. Of course, Gibson goes even further, with the points of the diamond pushing the work at its edges, testing the limits of the frame. They stretch, but don’t give way, a sea of tension. This other aspect of Gibson’s works is sublime. Were he a pure abstractionist, we would see these intrusions into the works’ limits as purely conceptual. Instead, these are the works of a painter, a pictorialist, who combines the language of narrative with the process of abstraction. Every work is a story. Reading it simply requires stillness. “I know you can/I know you will/Fight my battle/If I just keep still/Lord be a fence around me everyday.”

Now, pause. Remember, the art is the artist as much as the artist is the art. With that being said, there’s just one more thing. In early 2020, Delrico Gibson was injured so severely in a kitchen fire that it transformed his life forever. But never one to falter, he persisted. Persisted through unimaginable trials and tribulations, persisted in the understanding that creativity and beauty would always have the power to overcome. These are his story, each but a moment of his history therein. He has invited us to join him on his journey – ours from without, his from within.