Max Brand: Blue Elevator Pitch
The verbal description of a visual form should take about 10 seconds. This is the optimal length of time for words to drift to the top and make their way out into the conversational arena. Longer than this, and they might need to be rended forcefully from the corners of the brain in which they linger. Tell me about yourself. Keep it positive. Don鈥檛 cry. There鈥檚 no 13th floor. Your back brain controls the yaw. It鈥檚 the elevator that controls the pitch and that鈥檚 what allows the scale to go sky high. The hertz are in the details. Theirs is the timbre of a single raindrop turning to steam on the pavement amidst a downpour.
Blue Elevator Pitch, Max Brand鈥檚 first solo exhibition in New York in six years, is comprised of 12 large-scale canvases, each increasingly dense, eclectic, and maximal. Untitled and identified by arbitrary numbers, they propose a collapsing of abstract and representational space, eradicating the subject-ground relationship and suggesting an almost Jungian territory in which familiar forms are revealed to be monsters, morphological anomalies, complexes of the ego and the collective unconscious. Each picture contains at least one 鈥渟tain,鈥� a region that resembles a pile of bird droppings, or else nods to a palette. Are these areas in which Brand mixed paint, leaving it to dry as if he is still standing next to the work, tinkering with it? Our expectations-that a limb might connect to a central mass, that a houseplant might delineate a domicile, or that a gesture might track back to an expressive domain, are dashed, made absurd, or revealed as fallacy. Brand shows us contemporary figurative painting鈥檚 totemic apotheosis. It looks a little bit like the 1970鈥檚.
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The verbal description of a visual form should take about 10 seconds. This is the optimal length of time for words to drift to the top and make their way out into the conversational arena. Longer than this, and they might need to be rended forcefully from the corners of the brain in which they linger. Tell me about yourself. Keep it positive. Don鈥檛 cry. There鈥檚 no 13th floor. Your back brain controls the yaw. It鈥檚 the elevator that controls the pitch and that鈥檚 what allows the scale to go sky high. The hertz are in the details. Theirs is the timbre of a single raindrop turning to steam on the pavement amidst a downpour.
Blue Elevator Pitch, Max Brand鈥檚 first solo exhibition in New York in six years, is comprised of 12 large-scale canvases, each increasingly dense, eclectic, and maximal. Untitled and identified by arbitrary numbers, they propose a collapsing of abstract and representational space, eradicating the subject-ground relationship and suggesting an almost Jungian territory in which familiar forms are revealed to be monsters, morphological anomalies, complexes of the ego and the collective unconscious. Each picture contains at least one 鈥渟tain,鈥� a region that resembles a pile of bird droppings, or else nods to a palette. Are these areas in which Brand mixed paint, leaving it to dry as if he is still standing next to the work, tinkering with it? Our expectations-that a limb might connect to a central mass, that a houseplant might delineate a domicile, or that a gesture might track back to an expressive domain, are dashed, made absurd, or revealed as fallacy. Brand shows us contemporary figurative painting鈥檚 totemic apotheosis. It looks a little bit like the 1970鈥檚.
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The verbal description of a visual form should take about 10 seconds. This is the optimal length of time for words to drift to the top and make their way out into the conversational arena.
The verbal description of a visual form should take about 10 seconds. This is the optimal length of time for words to drift to the top and make their way out into the conversational arena.
