#max cole

Max Cole: Breaking Day

June 30th - July 22nd, 2023

Opening Reception for the Artist: Friday, June 30th, 5 - 7 PM

The day-to-day fades over time. The intricate and intimate details recede, leaving only a broad sweep of experience. Patterns of a life lived. What remains that is bright? What remains that feels, in the remembering, more real than the next every-day before you?

A memory. The kind of memory where all the senses meet and converge: a piercing quality of the light, the smell of the air, the feel of the world intersecting on your skin, sound so pure and present that it is almost visible. That sharp intake of breath as you arrive in the past, firmly, for at least a breath or two, inhabiting a place where you once were. Vivid. Hyper-real. Memories that change, if only for a while, everything about how you see yourself, your life, the world.

Most of us don’t have very many of these sorts of memories. And retrieving them, finding the still and focused place where they can rise to the surface, can be perishingly difficult.

Max Cole’s paintings are pathways to these moments.

It is impossible to pin down precisely which element or quality of Cole’s paintings generates this perceptual magic – probably because these pieces are so much more than the sum of their parts. Cole’s paintings are studies in precision, in balance, in focus. Pared down to neutrals and earth tones, to the dialogue of vertical and horizontal, this austere vocabulary belies the rich and seemingly infinite language that Cole is able to create with her paintings.

In 2015, Cole was asked to participate in a centennial celebration of Malevich, which brought her to focus in on the form of the Greek Cross. The form, which Cole sees as expressing a perfect equilibrium, has continued to inspire Cole since. These new works, showing in Breaking Day, and painted since Cole’s move back to New Mexico, still reference the form – but seem to be in a process of cracking open the shape. In some of the pieces in the exhibition, such as Dreamer or Phantom, the cross remains omnipresent. However, others, like Haiku or Reflection seem to have broken and unlocked the form.

With their subtlety and quiet beauty, these paintings, despite their deceptive simplicity, present a continuous unfolding. There is a movement between each band of color, each fine line, which the eye follows – focusing first in, then out, detail and then whole, back to detail. And as the viewer eases into a relationship with the painting, sinks into sympathy with it, the quality of attention begins to shift, deepening, softening, expanding.

This is the pathway. Because what seems to lie beyond the sum of the paintings’ parts is a quality of presence, imparted during their creation. It is easy to make a correlation between Max Cole’s process, as an artist, and the objects that she creates. For Cole, art is a form of spiritual expression. If the world of artists had an official monastic order, Cole would be a member. She lives her life, wholly, according to art’s rhythms, in a constant state of mindful attention, contemplation, in quiet solitude and devotion to creation. The paradoxical state of soft and sharp focus, of vivid awareness, is what, slowly but surely, opens up a possibility of that state within the viewer.

From there, from that state of quiet immanence (of immanence as transcendence), those bright moments, those sharp-as-glass memories, rise up through us. Each memory a jewel in a chain of moments in our lives when we were vibrantly alive, the chain connecting us to now. Connecting us to the gallery, to the painting, to the brushstroke, to the breath, to the artist, to that something new, shining, awakening, breaking open over the horizon.

-Michaela Kahn

Quicksilver: A Group Exhibition

Max Cole: The Bounding Circle

Max Cole: The Bounding Circle September 10 - October 10, 2021 Opening Reception: Friday, September 10, 5 - 7 P.M.

There are rhythms inside us: the beating of the heart, the expansion and contraction of the lungs, blood cycling through the body, the coordinated motions of the villi, the rhythm of an eyelid opening and closing. There are rhythms outside us: the susurration of tides, the long beat of day turning into the long beat of night, the movement of seasons coming, going, returning.

Max Cole’s paintings contain rhythms. Oriented like landscapes these quiet and expansive works contain rhythms of repeating lines – horizontals of muted colors and horizontals made from the soft, fine, perfect vertical marks that Cole is so well-known for. Eggshell, sand, shadow, bark, fencepost, flower petal, wet earth, clay pot, bands of these soft colors alternate, open, repeat – woven together, speaking to each other in a unique language.

To be with one of Max Cole’s paintings is to be made to stand on the earth (really stand on the earth) and to open oneself, slowly, to the rhythmic language Cole is offering us. Many have suggested that Cole’s pieces suggest landscapes, distant horizons of repeated lines: fenceposts, powerlines, tree lines, furrowed fields, tall grass. While Cole’s work is not figurative, or even directly inspired by landscapes, they do have the effect of placing the viewer within their own unique, banded worlds.

The pieces included in The Bounding Circle were all created during an artist residency that Cole participated in in the mid-1990’s in Roswell, New Mexico. The pieces she created during that period were part of a show at the museum there at the end of her residency, and the ones included in this exhibition have not been shown since.

After a time in Los Angeles, Cole had moved to Manhattan to pursue her painting in a creative milieu that felt more in line with her aesthetic. She showed work in New York for many years, as well as keeping a studio in Germany and showing extensively in Europe. However, at a certain point, Cole felt that she wouldn’t be able to continue in the city and moved her studio to the Hudson Valley before eventually returning to the West. The Roswell Residency came at a time when she was looking to explore New Mexico as a new home.

While previous works had tended to be darker, heavier, with undertones of reds and blues, influenced by the darker skies and light of New York and Europe, the light and space of Roswell changed Cole’s work, shifting her palette significantly into lighter tones of earth, whites, pale blues, grays. Roswell, not too far from Cole’s native panhandle region, was a bit like coming home.

The pieces in this exhibition show something of this transition – with darker  works like Aeolus opening up into the more spacious (and tonally lighter) pieces like Pale Horse II or Datura. The titles don’t come first, but after, suggested by the finished paintings. This in itself is a clue to deciphering these works. Rather than looking for equivalencies, instead the viewer does well to sink gently down into experiences.

What happens, in the body, the mind, in the spirit, as one stands still and allows oneself to fall freely into a painting like Nightshade? Paradox. The unique  viewer, standing with the unique painting, begins to sync, to breathe with the  rhythms of the lines, to find a place as a human vertical standing in the  horizontal of the gallery – reflected, reflecting, identifying.

The experience is a form of translation. Reading the paintings as transcriptions of energy, of the artist’s state of being while she painted. It is there – in the energy Cole used as she created those fine, vibrating lines, a message. The transmutation of energy into matter, and through the viewer’s gaze, back to energy again. A rhythm, endlessly returning.