MAXIMILLION

The character of the artist Maximillion was forged in the white heat of a mental health disintegration and re-integration. At its lowest point of virtual non-existence, it was experienced as if only a single particle of his being remained, strung out in the bitter winter snow, of a blank February sky in 2013. Slowly, ever so slowly it thawed, the ice melted. Hard and brittle became soft and flowing; a new being was formed: better, stronger and wiser than before. Inside white hot, creativity glowed, then in August 2016 it erupted with the discovery of a new artistic technique ‘transient’ collage. This new dawn heralded an exploration of Surrealism’s world of dreams… 

NEW SURREALISM

Taking inspiration from the original Surrealist art movement of the 1920’s and in particular influenced by the work of Luis Bunuel, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Maximillion felt compelled to further explore dream imagery and the unconscious. Using analogue and digital techniques Maximillion’s New Surrealism represents a continuum for the 21st century. 

TRANSIENT COLLAGE

Maximillion’s transient collages are created using vintage ephemera & found objects. The term transient is used to describe the process. Each collage is an arrangement of disparate images and objects that ‘fit’ (when subjected to a subconscious process) like the pieces of an unfathomable jigsaw, and when they coincide, it is that moment that is captured digitally. The image has only existed fleetingly, before disorder returns. 

ALCHEMY

Maximillion’s images are captured and printed digitally. However they are NOT digitally manipulated. What happens in that theatrical moment, when realities collide, cymbals crash and the red velvet curtains part to reveal the unfathomable, is pure alchemy. 

THEMES & MOTIFS

The imagery used in these hauntingly beautiful prints, ranges from 18th century French portraiture and early Victorian photography to 1940’s and 50’s film stars and pin-up girls. Some works feature pop portraits reminiscent of Warhol’s, and though featuring embellishments of gold and copper foil, do not explore notions of celebrity, but instead offer the viewer a vision of unknown beings glimpsed in another realm. In these pictures bodies and faces are often obscured and distorted, sometimes by masks, found objects, tricks of light and a frequent motif of a spiral snail shell (snails were an obsession of Dali’s, and Einstein envisaged the shape of the universe as a mollusc.)

Some figures have insect heads suggesting a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, provoking a sense of disassociation from the human, toward the alien ‘other’. In ‘The Omnipresent Opening’ the image is spilt in two, one half a mirror reflection of the other. This possibly reveals another reality, in which a maleficent female deity becomes a black hole, from which nothing can escape.