2005 Catalogue Essay
2005 Catalogue Essay
Max Lieberman selects his subjects for their visual qualities, their simplicity of shape, their colour and their symbolic nature. He is interested in the drama and tension created by their arrangement, and often paints fewer objects than is conventional in the long still life tradition.
In his paintings and drawings, ordinary objects become symbols or archetypes charged with subtle philosophical overtones. His work lives and breathes in the counterpoint between the strangeness of the world and its ordinary, domestic familiarity. The things we use and often overlook, he insists, imbue something of ourselves within them. They have their own histories, which they carry into the present.
Usually practical and useful by nature, in the process of their representation in paint his subjects spring free from daily contingencies. Old glass bottles, jugs, wooden bottles, used kitchen utensils, boxes, ceramics, a shaving brush, a mobile phone, toys, and a pair of kitchen scales find a complex life in this work, and their juxtapositions defy customary domestic groupings.
Objects may be clumped together – rather like a cityscape, or they may be separated so that the individuality of their form and texture is emphasized. He often works in low light conditions such as those in the late afternoon – leading to subtle colour variations and temperatures. Humble subjects – like ‘take-away’ coffee cups, or a pair of cut tomatoes sitting side by side like a contented couple – are presented to us almost as if they are posing for their portraits.
His paintings are composed with the simple, formal device of the horizon line. The specific placement of this line charges his work with tension, creating a stage, and a shallow space that he explores and manipulates with great effect.
Some objects create the uncanny sensation of a presence rolling forwards through the painted surface. Sometimes, like Cezanne, who painted his objects so that their size was in proportion to their importance to the composition as a whole, he distorts the scale of things, or tilts them conspicuously forwards.
The notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ form a dialectic in his work. When we look at these vases and vessels tilted so far forwards to the picture frame, the space they enclose assumes an importance equal to that of the subject’s form. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are not abandoned to their usual geometric opposition but instead become supple, intriguing and continuous extensions of each other.
The plastic values of Lieberman’s painting create tensions between the strategies of his compositions and the actual process of painting, between the issues of depth, gravity and weight, and of flatness. Whether broadly applied or finessed to the point where no brush strokes are visible, these plastic values permit the viewer to enter into the actual process and action of painting.
Lieberman is deeply interested in Indian culture and travels to India regularly. His work often includes household items from India such as tins, jars, and balls of string. His painting even celebrates Indian packaging in which he finds miniature summaries of the Indian aesthetic.
A number of his paintings are so small they can easily be held in the hand. Through this reduction in scale the poetic idea of their subject is heightened and emerges with the immediacy and vitality of a drawing.
The exhibition also includes a number of drawings, notable for their spontaneity, freshness, and Lieberman’s disciplined probings into the mysteries of his subject matter.
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It is easy to locate the earthy, the sensual, and the playful dimensions of Max Lieberman’s paintings, their deadpan directness, vitality and fun. It is not so easy to tease out the air of implacability of these images, the manner in which Lieberman awakens a sense of the world that seems to have already lived, but covertly – a world which is habitually passed over, or made obscure by its familiarity.
In his book ‘The Poetics of Space’, Gaston Bachelard writes: ‘Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.’ Something like that seems to be going on here. Lieberman’s compositions challenge indifference, they create whirlpools and disturbances in contexts that we find commonplace, and to which we usually give the briefest attention. Their wholly unexpected nature reverberates within the field of the human psyche.
In his hands the casual connection between things acquires a magical quality, as though a gust of wind unites them. They open up to a vista of the present in which we feel the casual, unremarked breath of humanity. Lieberman sets out to surprise himself, he says, and in so doing he engages and surprises us.
Cathy Peake, 2005