Max Speed

Max Fleury and Sabina Rizos-Shaw discuss fantasy painting and visual enjoyment in the context of Fleury’s exhibition Max Speed.

Max Fleury, Sweaty Vignettie, 2022, puzzle, plastic mirror frame. Courtesy of the artist and play_station. Photo: Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha

Sabina Rizos-Shaw: There's a lot of animals in the show.

Max Fleury: There are a lot of animals in the show.

Was that a curatorial decision that you made early on or—

No, the animals happened organically. All the artworks in the show ended up containing an animal. In one artwork there's the lenticular wolf. Then there's a series of three digital animal portraits printed on canvas; and a horse puzzle framed in a light up love heart frame. In the main video artwork, there are two seagulls singing Close to You by The Carpenters.

I guess this resulted from the kind of imagery that I started off with—found pictures, puzzles and art prints from op shops; but also office and home staging art (for real estate). These pictures often have, you know, an animal as the subject. I sent briefs to a digital fantasy artist on Fiverr to paint. 

The lenticular wolf and horses are very mystical.

The horses came from a puzzle painted in a fantasy style. I can't remember the name of the painter. I should probably remember that [In Another World by Christian Riese Lassen]. He’s one of those very virtuosic painters—someone who's really good at realistic painting. 

Max Fleury, Knots, 2022, puzzle, lenticular image, steel frame. Courtesy of the artist and play_station. Photo: Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha

Almost too realistic.

Yea they are. They’ve got a lot of shading; it all gets very hazy and ethereal.

What interests you about that?

I'm interested in genres of things and I feel like that style of painting is a recognisable genre that's not so revered within the fine art world. I found it enjoyable as a child—this kind of photorealist fantasy painting is probably part of my formative engagement with visual culture. But going to art school and whatnot, I learnt to dislike those things. Maybe I'm coming around to enjoying them again.

I have a very distinct memory of having some kind of fairy book when I was a kid that was not fairy tales, but fairy stories about, you know, people going into the forest. It was really well illustrated with beautiful hyper realistic fantasy scenes. I don't remember any of the stories, but I remember having a very visual connection to the art.

Yeah. And I guess when you're a child, that's what you imagine artists do—spend, like, a lot of time working on really detailed paintings. But my experience of what artists do now isn’t about spending a lot of time slaving over paintings in the studio. There are different jobs to be done.

How do you see the relationship between the video and the rest of the works in the show?

I wanted to assemble the exhibition out of ideas that I hadn’t followed through with in the past—a body of canvas prints, a collage made out of puzzles; and for the video work, there are a few subjects that it vaguely touches on that probably aren’t evident when viewing it, but are there in the genesis of the work. For example, I’m kind of obsessed with this proposal that Bena Jackson and I wrote when we were finishing art school, which we sent to a few artist-run spaces and was never accepted. It was to recreate The Da Vinci Code using the story of Alice May Williams, with an AB Circle Pro as a prop, which was a slightly absurd combination of subjects. 

Alice May Williams was an amateur astronomer from the early 1900s who grew up in Newtown and spent the rest of her life living in Auckland. She wrote a series of (now famous as outsider art) letters to astronomers in LA (at Mt Wilson Observatory). Her perspective on the galaxy was heavily based in faith and religion and of what everything in the sky meant and what was possibly lurking up there—various kinds of magical magical ships and stars as windows into heaven. These letters became famous in…I think it was the ’90s because the Museum of Jurassic Technology in the US had an exhibition of them as this outsider art curiosity. They were also revisited in a show at Michael Lett maybe 10 years ago with kind of big artists. I think it was Michael Parekōwhai and Simon Denny (and others) making space-themed artworks. I guess I was interested in how these things become art moments, what shifts something to become worthy of attention and vice versa.  

The video tries to tease out a few of those formal elements into, uh, something that's about folk art in the south coast in Wellington. 

The video does feel like a series of art moment prompts that don’t hugely relate to each other outside of that—[except for the fact that] they all have the same kind of loveliness. For example, the e-scooter situation, which is something you've always been interested in—and sort of constructing, I don't even know how to describe what that is, but—when you have a bunch of found objects and you put 'em together and zoom around. How would you describe that?

I guess if I was putting it formally, that came from trying to use a scooter as a drawing tool. Maybe this time I was [also] trying to think about pimping it out.

Max Fleury, A Hole in the Horizon [still], 2022, sd digital video, mdf, vinyl. 8:07 min min. Courtesy of the artist and play_station

Max Fleury, A Hole in the Horizon [still], 2022, sd digital video, mdf, vinyl. 8:07 min min. Courtesy of the artist and play_station

If you go back to the idea of what you think art is when you're a kid, the idea of a really pimped out scooter is a very childlike sensibility of peak cool stuff.

Pimp My Ride was such a good show. 

In Pimp My Ride, the rides always have an extra function, like a hot pool.

Yeah. Pimp My Ride was more about extravagant functionality rather than just looking good.

Yeah. Whereas I feel that the scooter in your most recent video—it looks really good, but it doesn't have extra functionality. Some of your scooters in the past have had extra functionality.

In this work, I wanted something that was about a photography moment, responding to the camera flash. That meant pimping it up with glitter and taking photos of it in the dark. 

Max Fleury, A Hole in the Horizon [still], 2022, sd digital video, mdf, vinyl. 8:07 min min. Courtesy of the artist and play_station

Talk to me a little bit about the rock stacks.

I recently moved to Island Bay and spend a lot of time walking around the beach. One of the notable features of Island Bay compared to other beaches in Wellington is there are a lot of rock stacks along the shoreline. I'd heard about the ‘Island Bay rock stacker’ before from a tutor at art school who had unkind things to say about him. Also, I don't know if the ‘Island Bay rock stacker’ is a him, or is even one person at all.

It could be a collective? 

It could be a collective, but I feel that they kind of exist in the imagination of Island Bay as ‘the rock stacker.’ I could probably ask around and find the truth, but I don't know if I really want to. 

I think that's something that’s true to a lot of art, but I also feel like the moments in your video exist nicely as they are—you can extrapolate from them as a viewer or be fascinated with aspects of them, but if you explain them too much they stop being as interesting. Like, if you find out exactly who the ‘rock stacker’ is and why he, or they, stack rocks, it just becomes a Stuff article or something? 

Not knowing can be much more satisfying.

What would your ideal viewer take from your show?

I would hope that people might get some enjoyment out of visual elements of their life that they perhaps didn't see value in before. Often I'm pretty amused by things that I don't think are very nice. I like to work with them and see if I can get them to a place where I do enjoy them. I guess that's why I was interested in canvas prints, which I had a pretty negative relationship with from having family photos printed out on them. I think they're a bit of a blight, but that makes them funny— and loaded with preconceptions to toy with.

So the sensibility that you approach those sorts of things with—would you say that you are appreciating the low taste or do you think that there's an element of condescension to it?

I think they are layered judgments that we have [in response] to these things. When I say they’re low taste, it's not necessarily me saying they are. Maybe the consensus on them is that they're a bit naff or...

Twee? Or, no, twee is cuter than fantasy painting. Camp? 

In an art sense, it's kind of camp, but I guess it's not in the setting of the home. I do imagine this person who never went to art school or engaged with art, and how they appreciate things through their set of values. I'm trying to smash these different responses together? I don't know how I would describe it.. 

Well, I think there's something lovely about a thing being so beautiful and so high effort that it is almost too much. I remember one time I went really hungover to this tutorial for a design thinking class in first year (at Elam [School of Fine Arts]). We had to bring along something that we thought was really beautiful and talk to the class about why we thought it was really beautiful. I had this Polaroid on my wall of my partner at the time. He was shirtless and had kiss marks all over his body. He had lipstick on and had his hair slightly slicked back and it was taken on a flash Polaroid camera. I remember this woman looking at it and she was like, “wow, everything's happening in that picture.” It's almost as if it came together to be too beautiful, but it’s an aesthetic that I love. You're trying everything. You put them all together. It’s like it’s somehow trying too hard. But at the same time, what’s wrong with trying too hard?

Yeah, and those things can become pretty personal; but then maybe to someone else they're a bit extra, almost in a slightly monstrous kind of way.

Like two seagulls vibing out to The Carpenters.

Max Fleury, A Hole in the Horizon [still], 2022, sd digital video, mdf, vinyl. 8:07 min min. Courtesy of the artist and play_station

Max Fleury, A Hole in the Horizon. Installation view, play_station, Wellington. Photo: Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha

I know this ’cause I'm familiar with your other shows, but I really like the mid-lighting—I think it creates a sort of, like, how do you say this without just saying it—it's a slightly sexy atmosphere.

What kind of sexy do you mean? Like sleazy sexy or like how restaurants dim their lights so your date looks better?

I think it's like somewhere in between. It puts you in the mood that you'd want to be in. If you were engaging with fantasy art, or you were at a restaurant and looked up the wall and you were like, whoa, that's a beautiful horse.

Yeah. I'm not sure what else to say about that. But um—

I like your hanging screen as well.

Thank you. It's pretty practical, you know, made by just being able to go to the hardware store and buy a piece of wood, some shackles, some chains and some paint— you can very quickly turn that into something that's quite minimal and useful. It's nice to give videos a bit of shape. It's so boring when they’re projected onto the wall.

Where to next?

Who knows. At the moment I’m driving 25 Ks an hour into the sunset and I dunno what’s down the highway.

Max Fleury, Max Speed. Installation view, play_station, Wellington. Photo: Hendrix Hennessy-Ropiha

RELATED READING

MORE CONVERSATIONS