WORMHOLES

Text by Maggie Brink

Speaking of stones and trees, the bones of things
Beneath the wheel of stars
Dark outside and cold and no wind

The lines above are taken from some notes sent to me by Max, in aid of me articulating this response to his work for Wormholes. I’ve been responding privately to Max’s work for quite some time but to put into words what he and I seem similarly predisposed to leave to painting to say, is another thing. The writer Deborah Levy, who is a hero of mine, said that ‘to not over explain is to work at a human friendly level of consciousness.’ So that's what I’ll try to do here. Failing that, Max’s words can stand in.

Max and I are both painters, and both parents of very young children, and both people who moved from metropolitan to regional areas in recent years. (It feels appropriate that I’m shovelling mulch between stints at my computer.) These parallels in our experience will no doubt colour my reading of his work.

The texture of life and our experience of it is always made by one thing folding into others, in turn informing the texture of our reading of anything. Accordingly, I made the easy assumption that Max’s landscapes refer to his immediate environment, the hinterland of Queensland's Sunshine Coast. In fact — his sources come from far and wide — but I believe that his immediate environment infiltrates these paintings of other places. His environment, not to mention the environment, is too much on his mind not to insert itself somewhere.

Because Max is a science fiction reader and I happen to love Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I imagine the landscapes having a certain ‘Area-X’ quality — something extraterrestrial in the terrestrial. My pleasure in looking at them, whilst they are beautiful, is in the sense of ill-ease, or uncanniness that’s also there and that echoes the folding of one thing into another, morphing and mutating sones and entities. To me, Max’s use of line and colour lends itself to this, though others will see and feel something else entirely.

Max is entirely comfortable with the way someone else reads his work; that is up to them. He prioritises a simple and vernacular approach to painting. Perhaps because he didn’t go to art school.

I was initially rejected from art school but it might have been good for me. Later, when I finally got there, I loved it! Maybe that extra time outside helped me recognise a process

of de-institutionalising oneself that’s necessary for some, to make good work, or, to go on making work at all. The painters amongst my cohort were all tied up in knots — primarily about painting being dead — and desperately trying to figure out how to enter the expanded field at any cost, crippled by the weight of needing to reinvent the wheel all of a sudden. The sculptors and performers amongst us, asking: “What the hell is wrong with all you painters!?”

Max’s great agency as a painter might be in his ready understanding that he need not invent something; it's being possible to paint anything. The Danish painter Tal R has said: ‘You can’t stay an amateur but you should never forget the amateur in you because they are the painter that says simply, “I’m going to make a painting. Of something that fascinates me!” For Tal R the point of painting is to search for a personal mathematics or equation for how to use language to suggest to someone else the thing that fascinates you. To use language as simply as possible first, and second, to bend that language in the direction of where you locate yourself in that subject.

Max is fascinated by paint and he paints what he finds fascinating. Whilst very much aware of them, he isn't overly preoccupied by the art-historical precedents of painting when he sets to work. He believes in its value as a language, not least of all because it’s available to him, an endlessly renewable resource with a direct communicative capacity.

I think the aspirations of Max’s painterly language might be approached via Italian writer Italo Calvino's notion of exactitude. For Calvino, this term denotes a quality of language that is ‘as precise as possible in its choice of words and in its expression of the nuances of thought and imagination.’ Exactitude, from a word that exists only in Italian — icastico — translates as something in the vicinity of incisive and memorable: The phrase icastico e pregnante ― vivid and pregnant; evocative of an incisive, memorable image rich in meaning.

Clavino locates the impulse to exactitude in a defence against the dizzying barrage of images that don't seem to mean anything. This ‘defence’ relates to a sense of anxiety felt in response to a perceived lack of cohesion, clarity, linear consequence.... the formlessness of history, time, meaning. It's all about the concomitance of pleasure and fear in the face of the infinite...the Big Bang, life, the beginning, history, unimaginable lengths of time, hence came the amoeba in the chaos... (another of Max’s lists — not unlike Calvino’s!)

I for one enjoy the barrage of supposedly meaningless images (the literal domain of the painter who works from source images scavenged everywhere!) because — meaningless to who? — the vertical and horizontal movements available through the deluge is a rich environment from which to pick out a thread that means something to me. The thread

pick is essentially the same defence, in different terms, a means of negotiating the razor's edge between chaos and exactitude. Where in Calvino’s conclusion, precision is a means of revealing the beauty of the indeterminate and vague.

I don’t know how much Max will relate to what I’m saying here, I suppose he’ll let me know. But I believe Max’s many iterations of images through painting seek to work through paint’s problems in pursuit of these qualities. Each painting reveals a moment along this trajectory. It's in the procession of images, the one painting that’s made possible by the last, and so on and so on that matters most.

I love the painting Flowers 1. When I first saw it I thought of a folder of saved images, I have — ‘maybe paint?’s,’ — depicting fields of flowers. None were captured where I live, but somehow they refer to the fields of variegated thistle that populate the Southern Fleurieu Peninsula, the part of Kaurna Land on which I live and work. The painting brought to mind a song that the boy scouts used to sing — I love the Flowers, I love the daffodils / I love the mountains, I love the rolling hills... and left me thinking about the Druids and other Nature religions, earth cults, and the Kibbo Kift, who were born out of a schism in the upper echelons of the boy scout movement over disillusionment with the latter’s militaristic and nationalistic leanings.

The name Kibbo Kift was derived from a cheshire dialect term that described ‘proof of great strength’ which is pertinent to a certain athleticism that Max brings to his practice of painting as both a physical and mental practice; no place for complacency or hesitation. (As an aside, I discovered during my research that Are worms hardworking is a popular google search.)

The Kibbo Kift’s aspiration to a kind of secular universalism is also Max-like in that I think it would appeal to him. They were not without a political position, quite the opposite. They channelled their energy into a specific set of activities and practices as a means for expressing it implicitly rather than rallying around an overt political agenda.

I’m fascinated by the architecture that crops up across the work in Wormholes — meeting houses I think? The meeting house traditionally served as both places of worship and open public discourse, incorporating within their walls what became oppositional structures as culture and communities became increasingly secular. They are what essentially became town halls.

When I came to live here, I was particularly struck by the presence of town halls. The towns scattered around this peninsula each have one. They are quite beautiful because of the way they can be written onto. Places that mean something sometimes, they also

point to where people struggle to make things mean something, to where the fabric does not cohere.

Multipurpose, ceremonial, hireable, public gathering places. They are simple and modest and yet for the most part more grand than any of the houses. A very different economy of buildings and uses than a city architecture implies. They host school fetes, agricultural shows, amateur theatre, dances, car boot sales and any number of other gatherings around various interests and beliefs. I love the stages built into them. I never see them activated, which appeals deeply to my interest in the idea of a performance that never happens. There's beauty and also strangeness, (like Max’s landscapes,) the pleasure in both.

I think of these images as an invitation to reside metaphorically within the meeting house, to unpack our psychological bags inside them, to reconcile for a moment the interconnection of our spiritual and secular beliefs and the practices that we produce our worlds by. It's a safe space in a sea of infinite possible meanings and relevancies, to cordon off one particular version for a moment and consider it before returning to a sea of equally viable alternatives, and a reminder that we are all active participants in producing the culture. Unlike a church or my private home where a singular ideology reigns, the meeting house, because it can be anything for anyone, even in being one thing in a specific time allows for the existence of all others simultaneously.

So I think the subject of the meeting house has a meaning that refers to the impossibly vast possibilities of meaning itself and to the activity of painting as a kind of diagramatic representation of how this same problem might be negotiated.

There are certain problems for which there is not a general or singular solution, but rather particular solutions, the exploration of which brings one closer to something like resolution. To both painting and living in general this applies. The project should never be completed. I want the meeting house to go on being all the different places and seeking to resolve the complex relations between them. I don’t really want to see the painting that ultimately resolves the pursuit of the thing once and for all. I want to see iterations that represent attempts and approaches forever instead.

I often think about the way David Byrne (Talking Heads David Byrne,) once described the great privilege of doing the same thing — making the same thing over and over again — and the way each of us is able to discover therein what there is to work out. I often think about this when I’m thinking about painting, so perhaps not surprisingly I see something of this idea manifest in Max’s paintings, and in Max's painting them.

Maybe what there is for Max to work out in the repetitious activity of making paintings is to communicate with greater and greater efficacy and economy about what fascinates him, in as direct a way as possible, activating the precise, the brief — painting to produce wormholes — attempting to close vast spaces between distinct points in his own perception of the world and as an invitation to others into whatever they find on the other side.

I think about the way a worm moves, contracting and lengthening, processing soil, literally eating and shitting its way through that more terrestrial sort of wormhole, the simplest form of processing and redistributing the earth and what it’s made up of.

Maggie Brink is an artist and writer who lives and works in Kaurna Land, SA. She is represented by ReadingRoom, Melbourne.

'Dressed to Thrill' is the latest solo exhibition by Paris-based artist Antwan Horfee, presented by China Heights Gallery in Sydney. This marks Horfee’s first solo show with the gallery since 2014. The exhibition features a selection of Horfee’s recent works, blending dynamic abstraction with figurative elements. His signature style, which draws on his street art background, combines spontaneous, fast-paced techniques with a more classical approach to painting. The result is a series of densely layered compositions that explore tension, perception, and visual distortion.

Horfee’s work is influenced by a broad range of sources, from science fiction and underground comics to traditional Japanese woodblock prints and virtual reality. His paintings often feature surreal figures or landscapes that shift between abstraction and recognisable imagery. The artist’s use of colour and form creates a sense of movement and fluidity, evoking both chaos and clarity. In his work, the viewer is invited to engage with the complexities of perception, as the layers of the compositions shift and transform with closer inspection.

Known for his experimental approach, Horfee’s practice blends both analog and digital techniques to create a unique visual language. Dressed to Thrill reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of how images are processed and manipulated, often referencing the psychological and perceptual distortions found in both psychedelic art and digital media. This exhibition offers a reflection on the relationship between perception, emotion, and visual representation, showcasing Horfee’s continued evolution as an artist.