By creating collages from an endless archive of images, the painter chooses the technique as the structural basis to his work. He transfers his own stencils onto canvas to paint on polyester with acrylic paint. Working on it repeatedly with a clutter of tools also apart from the brush, canvas and layers of paint are treated with rags, cutters, sandpaper, spatulas, sponges, and everyday objects for transfer printing such as plates, paint tubes, lids and plastic plates. The Multi-layered paintings are carefully changed intuitively until the end, but their potential is seemingly inexhaustible.
Painting becomes a process in Maximilian Arnold’s work, in which he bundles the seen and the fleeting into a highly specific cosmos; it becomes the archiving of the ephemerally and momentary real. Thus, the painters work emerges as an archive of happenings: It opens up the present, rendering it to the unexpected and new.
Arnold’s paintings can be explored again and again, enabling the viewer to experience it constantly in its entirety. Within the space of Via delle Mercede, in which Gian Lorenzo Bernini lived with his wife until his death in 1680, and which would later become Luisa Laureati Briganti’s Galleria dell’Oca, MATTA presents Arnold’s paintings, giving the works a position that lets the ever-changing quality of the space and the works emerge anew.
Marlene A. Schenk
at MATTA, Roma
until December 15, 2022