The paintings included in Max Cole’s new exhibition, “Jacob’s Ladder,” on view November 8 - December 13, 2024, continue a process of breaking open the Greek Cross forms which she began exploring in 2015. Here the cruciform structure is apparent but broken into and interrupted by tonal and linear blocks.
These paintings, with their painstaking precision of geometric shapes and intricate lines, feel like compositions of time: some meeting place between the geological evolution of mountains and the centuries long generational construction of cathedrals. They have the effect of stones, relics, or ruins. Solid. Freighted with a weight of memory and existence. These works appear as antidotes to a common state of fleeting, depthless, ethereal, soap bubble contemporary life, an opposite and remedy of the Gertrude Stein idiom, “There is no there, there.” Max Cole’s paintings, most assuredly, are filled with thereness.
