#max cole

[rearte2]

by Max Cole

[abstracteddistractions]

Max Cole, "Noble Nassau" (1981), 

Acrylic and ink on canvas, 

68 1/8 inches x 162 1/4 inches x 1 1/2 inches,

All photos Amy Ellingson/Hyperallergic

[cirusk]

*breath

[thunderstruck9]

Max Cole (American, b. 1937), Dune, 1986. Acrylic on canvas, 133 x 157 cm.

[charlottejacksonfineart]

Follow the Line

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in collaboration with Tia Collection

October 16 - November 14, 2020

The timing of this exhibition couldn’t really be more apt. Although art itself is timeless, able to offer us its own unique voice regardless of when it was created or when it is viewed – we are ourselves of course bound by time. We come through the door of a gallery or museum with the world trailing along behind us like streamers of chaos, concern, contentment, anxiety, and joy; with frenetic images and the blaring messages of our ever-present screens hovering always just nearby. We bring ourselves to quiet hallways and exhibition spaces and meet with the art there – forging an experience that is part now, part then, part art, part us.

Follow the Line is an exceptionally quiet exhibition. It is dominated by soft neutral tones of gray, beige, earth colors, white, and black and the small amounts of color that pop out here and there are muted and gentle. The titular line of this exhibition is omnipresent – from the black coil of Richard Serra’s July #17 to the insectile spikes of Alexander Calder’s La Botte; from the burnished stripes of Johnnie Winona Ross’ Bear’s Ears Seep to the dramatic bisecting lines of Max Cole’s Greek Cross XXXII.

Co-curated by Charlotte Jackson and Laura Finlay Smith of the Tia Collection, the exhibition includes an exclusive assembly of subtle and elegant works from the collection, with the addition of a small handful of pieces by Johnnie Winona Ross and Max Cole, who are represented by the gallery. Spanning time, style, and continents, the earliest works are two small glowing gelatin silver prints of contrasting geometric shapes by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Max Cole’s haunting Crucifixion (1962) and a Pablo Picasso portrait in oil, Busted’homme (1965) bring us to mid-twentieth century. Cy Twombly’s watery gouache Untitled (Ramification) from 1971 enters into a fascinating dialogue of horizontal and vertical with Bridget Riley’s 1976 gouache Light Grey with Small Twisted Curve.

The elusive lines of Johnnie Winona Ross’ Pass Creek Spring (with three small accompanying color studies) engage directly with the trio of Max Cole pieces across the gallery: color and line seeming to plait between them across the space. And finally, like the punctuation marks of the exhibition, the dynamism of the Calder sculpture’s irregular spikes seem to arc across the end of the gallery toward the muted gray-woven form of Ai Weiwei’s Bicycle Basket with Flowers (2014).

The Tia Collection of Santa Fe, NM was created with the exclusive intent to share an individual collector’s love for art across a variety of genres. As the collector has said - “At its heart, the Tia Collection is a global collection. It is a reflection of my travels and of my deep admiration for art of all genres and geographical origins. It is not a collection only for my appreciation — that would be far too confining. These are works that must be displayed for the world to see, admire, acknowledge, celebrate and are a testimony to the value of diverse cultures, histories and aesthetics.” The collection is curated and administered by Laura Finlay Smith who works closely with the collector whose focus includes artworks by contemporary Native American artists, historic Western American paintings and sculptures, as well as South East Asian, French Impressionist and Post-War/Modern and Contemporary masterworks.

This masterfully curated grouping of art works invites us to follow the line where it leads: to step through the chaos of daily life to hear what these works have to say to us. Whatever rages just outside the door, these works gently ease us into a moment of reflection, attention, and contemplation.

[abstracteddistractions]

Max Cole, “Ebony-Ivory III” (2022), 

Acrylic on linen, 36 x 36 inches.

image courtesy Max Cole Studio and Charlotte Jackson Fine Art

[charlottejacksonfineart]

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

Photos: Brad Trone

[thatsbutterbaby]

Max Cole - Blue Point, 1999.  Acrylic on canvas / 132 x 157,5 cm.