SANTA FE, NM.- 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, now on view at
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, 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 hori- zontal, 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 cor- relation 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 aware- ness, 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.
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
Breaking Day
June 30th, 2023 - July 22nd, 2023
