Contributed by Matt Phillips / Dana Frankfort’s exhibition “Life and Death” at Olympia presents eleven paintings that are by turns blunt and strikingly sensitive.These new works juxtapose the written word with gestural abstraction, the two languages simultaneously contradicting and supporting one another. Some paintings have legible text while in others the letters are all but gone, leaving the viewer to contemplate space where words have once been. The works are disparate, but each reaches toward a cohesive resolution.