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DODGE AND BURN
Max Wade -
Max Wade’s paintings are imagined landscapes in flux, where forms emerge and dissolve within fields of color and texture, resisting objective interpretation but still firmly grounded in the real world. Primarily working in oil, his paintings that ask questions of the viewers, rather than attempting to give answers. Wade pulls his subjects from his everyday life and travels, as he is drawn especially to overlooked spaces, with a sustained focus on the liminal areas in-between objects. His process begins with his sketchbook drawings, airy networks of relations, shapes cast by suspended encounters. From these drawings, Wade gathers new forms and spatial relations to work from, and takes his harvest to large-scale canvases, first drawing with charcoal and then rapidly applying the oil in washes of pigment. His work blooms as he adds elements from other drawings to create a patchwork of distilled experience.
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Wade’s style is marked by sweeping, gestural brushstrokes indicative of his process-driven approach and his deep engagement with the act of painting itself. Often taking on a large scale, Wade invokes the physical style of Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, as well as contemporaries like Amy Sillman. Wade’s use of a saturated palette contributes to his works’ undeniable joyous, emphatic quality, defined by the lyrical tension between these colors, textures and suggested subjects. It is a tension that isn’t so much resolved as channeled, by means of repetition, adaptation and restatement, into a rewarding vitality. The physicality of Wade’s painting process, especially at a large scale lends to vestigial rhythm, and energy that are ever-present and lend to dynamic paintings which pulsate with life. Each work’s pace and mood is largely set by music. A combination of styles and genres, from frantic jazz to repetitive minimalist compositions, music paces and invigorates the physicality of his studio practice.
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Steeplechase, 2020-2024Oil on linen51 1/4 x 39 3/8 inches
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I Saw Pharaoh Levitate, 2020-2024Oil on linen51 1/4 x 39 1/2 inches
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Fireflies, 2024Oil on linen47 1/4 x 37 1/2 inches
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DODGE AND BURN: MAX WADE
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