ARTISTS
Magnus Maxine: Riding The Blinds
I make my way to the work through a backyard 鈥� a navigation of gates, wood tables, a firepit 鈥� and take an unexpected turn into a canvas-cloaked shelter that houses surfaces which lie upright at an angle on homemade easels made of plywood and two-by-fours.
It is the substrata, the paper itself, that offers the works鈥� initial encounter, even though it is only nakedly available at the edges of the object. The undulating topography of the support greets me in advance of any hand-wrought demarcation or mark. My eye is allowed to grasp the thinness of the material, its necessary inadequacy in relation to the massing on top of it, its untimely agedness, its new translucency after slow saturation in the oil that seeps out from the painted zone.
This material, newspaper, is manifestly disposable. It is our culture鈥檚 most basic refuse while also carrying, daily, the weight of our transient fears, manias, and shame. These newspapers were kept, however. Their insides were pulped and pressed back onto their covers in large masses: ridges, swamps and cow-pies of slurry that obliterate the time-stamped, hyperbolic language of journalism and churn it into earthy, inchoate utterance. The eventual compost of all articulation, here.
The artist, Magnus Maxine, is asking for the paper to keep carrying that worldly weight while also providing an escape from knowing, from meaning. This weight and this lightness are brought out from within and placed back on to the surface. A resurfacing of the outer with the unmade-inner.
Over this landscape is layered an astonishingly intricate flesh. Pattern exceeds itself, becomes semi-dimensional, offers both breakage and repair. An image-field accumulates that is delicate and massive: a veil that is also the fitting of ancient wall-stones, a ship鈥檚 hull encrusted by a jeweler. It is read as the labor of tiny thousands. I am thinking 鈥渓ook at how many times this thing has been touched.鈥�
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I make my way to the work through a backyard 鈥� a navigation of gates, wood tables, a firepit 鈥� and take an unexpected turn into a canvas-cloaked shelter that houses surfaces which lie upright at an angle on homemade easels made of plywood and two-by-fours.
It is the substrata, the paper itself, that offers the works鈥� initial encounter, even though it is only nakedly available at the edges of the object. The undulating topography of the support greets me in advance of any hand-wrought demarcation or mark. My eye is allowed to grasp the thinness of the material, its necessary inadequacy in relation to the massing on top of it, its untimely agedness, its new translucency after slow saturation in the oil that seeps out from the painted zone.
This material, newspaper, is manifestly disposable. It is our culture鈥檚 most basic refuse while also carrying, daily, the weight of our transient fears, manias, and shame. These newspapers were kept, however. Their insides were pulped and pressed back onto their covers in large masses: ridges, swamps and cow-pies of slurry that obliterate the time-stamped, hyperbolic language of journalism and churn it into earthy, inchoate utterance. The eventual compost of all articulation, here.
The artist, Magnus Maxine, is asking for the paper to keep carrying that worldly weight while also providing an escape from knowing, from meaning. This weight and this lightness are brought out from within and placed back on to the surface. A resurfacing of the outer with the unmade-inner.
Over this landscape is layered an astonishingly intricate flesh. Pattern exceeds itself, becomes semi-dimensional, offers both breakage and repair. An image-field accumulates that is delicate and massive: a veil that is also the fitting of ancient wall-stones, a ship鈥檚 hull encrusted by a jeweler. It is read as the labor of tiny thousands. I am thinking 鈥渓ook at how many times this thing has been touched.鈥�
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