The title of his exhibition—Spooky Action at a Distance—references Albert Einstein’s description of quantum entanglement, where two particles become linked and share the same fate despite distance. Therefore, the quantum state of each particle in a group cannot be described independently from the state of the others.
Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is confronted with this duality of distance and influence. The large paintings appear like dancing molecules we are zooming into through a microscope, yet the scale makes us stand back to see the full picture. Ambient music is playing in a closed-off room, slightly muffled, and we can only hear it at a distance. The paintings are bookended by ready-made objects: at the entrance is the kitchen sink, and at the end of the exhibition is a raised sink countertop with warm light glowing from a carved-out hole. It’s as if we’ve fallen down the drain, and at the end, we are peering back up from the darkness below at where we started.
These distant and slightly mystical elements to the show follow what Max refers to as invisible threads—appearing distant, but at the same time curiously connected. In our interview, we trace and discuss some of these threads that have influenced Max’s work.
When we spoke at your show, you mentioned that you started some of the work a while ago, but didn’t know yet how they were related or what to do with them. Why was now the right time to pick them up again?
The paintings seemed so separate and quite individualistic at the time they were made, so they were sort of picked to the side. I was reading more about quantum entanglement, and it made me think about those works and how they could actually be connected to each other. Essentially, it sparked a re-evaluation or reconsideration on how I was approaching this show. I started to think about time differently because essentially, the idea of quantum entanglement is that the future can alter the past. If they are put into a show together in the future, then this changes the decision on how they’re connected. You put them into the site instead of them not being fit for something else. They actually fit each other.
When did you come across Quantum Entanglement?
I came across it online on a bit-sized space and physics page. Since giving the title of the show [Spooky Action at a Distance], people have been like “oh, is that because it’s in that book or that film?”, so I went and looked at those things. I was talking to a friend at the opening and she said, “I just read this whole book about stuff like this”. So I went and looked into that as well. I thought it was quite nice, and I like that about painting in general, there are weird connections that you get, built from conversations where someone adds to it.
I also thought about Federico Campagna, a philosopher whose work revolves around metaphysics. He was coming into the RA to do lectures, and he was saying we’re just like bulbs of energy who are perceiving things, and that reality is beyond our perceptions or comprehension, and we are connected energies. There’s a big distance between things, but also small currents of connection. They can be very close and personal, but also vague and expansive?
I was going to say a similar thing about your work in general, is that there’s a real zooming in and zooming out aspect. On the night, I think I said to you that I feel like I’m looking through a microscope at a petri-dish. But you also need to stand back because they’re such big pieces, and you can really feel those binaries?
Yeah, I’ve always been interested in paradoxes, and also of Magritte… we actually share the same birthday, which I’ve always liked. I find it quite important that the paintings are physical in their scale, there’s a presence, and they hold a certain amount of space. And usually, if I can control how much space I hav,e it’s usually like they have different gravities. Certain works, I feel like you can just stand back and look at them from a distance. Other works feel a bit more intimate, or some feel like you really need to move along with them—they create an almost gravitational pull. There’s always that element of the painting that has that micro-biological chemical atom or molecular kind of quality, and it feels quite fluid. They’re really reactive to the environment in terms of absorbing and refracting light, and they kind of shift with movement, and certain colours kind of animate themselves more under different kinds of light.
Thinking about Quantum Entanglement, there’s something quite sublime and romantic about it in your work. In the way that something can be both scary and beautiful?
Yeah, I guess a lot of the way things come about is they follow these invisible threads. It feels like I’m tuning into a static radio, and every now and then, you hear things. It’s kind of what the paintings feel like, it’s connected mass, and it’s static, and there are moments of better signal, and this feels enclosed within the painting, like a burnt CD and an encapsulation of informatio,n and there’s all the other things I like and other parts of me, there’s all those weird distant connections. Thinking about distance, if there is spooky action, then the distance is kind of nice. Everything is quite removed because we don’t consider it. And I’m very removed from the work in a way, it kind of feels like it just falls together. I’m there, and I’ve facilitated what’s happening. I’m removed in a lot of ways, but then those things always actually encompass things that are going on in life or how I’m feeling about something or someone.
I also wanted to ask you about the sinks that you used in your exhibition. I was thinking about how water kind of surreally travels through pipes from distant places and into the intimacy of our homes, and it reminded me of the duality of connection at a distance again. What was your thought process in incorporating these objects with your satin paintings?
Yeah, it’s funny, I guess the sink is a kind of black hole in your house, things just disappear down the sink. You don’t really think about the structural mechanisms behind where everything goes; it’s like this little void. You kind of find yourself staring down it when you’re brushing your teeth, as if it’s some sort of vacuum. I also have some sort of personal feeling towards it because lots of my friends growing up had this sink in their parents’ homes—it feels really familiar and nostalgic. I was also thinking about all these things that happen in a sink, like people wash their babies in sinks, and thousands of dishes have been cleaned. I don’t know, it’s kind of a portal between the home, the domestic, and something beyond. In terms of the sink as part of my artwork, it felt quite important that it was a kitchen sink. So that in theory I could claim that it was everything because it’s everything but the kitchen sink. But it is the kitchen sink, and it’s everything. I was thinking about that concept of eternity and the idea of something somehow touching everything, being connected to everything. Because the sink has a lightbulb in it, it’s sort of everything under the sun as well. I guess it’s sort of a Duchampian play on words.
I love the idea of the sink being a portal.
Yeah, I wanted the sink to be that when you’re entering, you’re entering the sink as if it’s another realm or threshold. It’s like a Tarkovsky film called Stalker. There’s a quarantine-like zone and you’re not allowed to trespass there, but these people hire a guy who knows how to navigate there and it’s very like “we have to go this way” and “not through this”, so it feels quite childlike and it’s about what these people leave, but essentially the idea is that within this zone there is a room that grants wishes. So each person on the trip has a wish they ask for, and the film starts in black and white, but when they enter the zone, it turns to colour. There’s this kind of mystery and magic that is charging the whole atmosphere.
The lighting and ambient music in your show also make you feel like you’re going through a cave or a tunnel, or even pipework?
Yeah, you kind of wiggle through; it has a set shape or path where you feel like you’re kind of swirling around. The sink countertop at the end of the show, that felt like a way to bookend the space. It connects to the beginning, and it has an end, and the end is like looking back through the hole of the drain, at where you’ve just come from. There’s a cyclical repetition, and when you leave, it’s like you’ve popped back out of the sink. It takes your head far out of the room. If you start thinking about the moon, sun, and planets, it sort of recontextualises things in cyclical repetitions.
