I’ve been reading a book about Philip Guston lately. I like finding out when great artists are riveted, almost to the point of worry, by other artists. For Guston, it was Rembrandt. His later period in particular: this is when the Dutch painter saw contours as optional, sometimes completely forgoing the edges that distinguished subject from space. There was something about this that made Guston feel Rembrandt’s portraits were “not a painting, but a real person”, as they had the rare ability to bypass what Guston called “the plane of art”. Rembrandt did this with subtlety and grace. To me, Max Keene’s work achieves something similar. But what it gives way to is not something material, like a person, but more vague and abstract: the deportment of memory.

The paintings in Back of House contain skilful renderings of figurative forms: a shoe print, ancient statues, wrenches, bota bags, a running figure, to name a few. It’s a playful range that seems more like a random selection from the mind’s archive of encountered images: an ordinary object, a moment in time. But what transcends Guston’s “plane of art” has more to do with Keene’s style, which seems to want to capture the nature of the unconscious realm itself: a single dilating room where images flow into and against one another. Keene’s chosen tool, the airbrush, is a helpful assist: its hazy articulation of forms, in subdued and feathery palettes, fade from one to the next without any convincing edge. Though figures are identifiable, the paintings feel closer to abstract, as the forms, like memories, are layered or as one with each other or the space around them. Some artists that include the unconscious in their work may tend toward the provocative or even absurd. Keene’s paintings are more a quiet offering of memory’s odd conflations, and a modest pictorial attempt at both gathering and parsing these elements while respecting the irreducible nature of unconsciousness. Like Rembrandt, Keene channels subtlety and grace.

Back to Philip Guston. He also believed that “frustration is one of the great things in art”, while “satisfaction is nothing”. Keene’s work may challenge the reasoned mind, which prefers its edges defined. But unlike art that satisfies, “to our increasing boredom” (Guston), another kind of art–elusive yet pervasive, vague yet sensical–is what actually lingers, because it cannot be pinned down. Its polyvalence keeps it in a state of becoming. Keene himself told me: “The confusing elements are necessary; it has to be that way to get the feeling.” He was talking about his work, but the same could be said about memory. What resists explanation nevertheless gives rise to affect: both art, and memory’s, intended audience.

Text by Rosemary Georgia Flutur

Max Keene is a Canadian artist. His work blends photosensitive material with airbrush painting, drawing from a visual language that spans a wide history and context. With an interest in the “out of step” elements of our everyday, his work seeks an unsettling tension between the familiar and the enchanted. He has exhibited across Canada in both a group and solo capacity, most recently as part of group exhibition Hasten Slowly at Afternoon Projects in Vancouver.

Keene’s practice examines our contemporary visual culture by looking at what it negates, the imagery and sensibility that is not algorithmically favoured and or approved by a focus group and is subsequently redesigned, painted over or left to fade in the sun. He focuses on the uncanny, unprofessional, unclear, uninviting, and unconventional to produce work that treats visual refuse and debris with a precise consideration.