“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the moment of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
– Aldous Huxley –
Ephemeral moments of awe, bliss, grief and suffering pass over us all, like a breath
from some deity. The impossibility of capture yet the certainty of passing. The sublime, a metaphysical experience, one of absolute confidence, yet one of undetermined
participation. These theoretical landscapes challenge the notion of painting as a
semiotic paradigm, existing within their own logic and straying from dogmatic
reasoning, indifferent of collective narratives & conventions.
Maximillian Brown redirects the focus of his paintings from the end product,
muddying the lines between the process and the result. Most importantly, the works are located in the same space and reality as the viewer and the viewer’s body. These paintings have done away blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation and the object world. They belong to nothing and no one; vagrants, nomads and runaways indeed, drifting in between the gaps of art history.
Through the Absent Landscape is presented in collaboration with V1 Gallery,
Copenhagen, Denmark. The text quotes the British writer Aldous Huxley and
the Danish Art Historian Astrid Wang.