Max Franosch's recent paintings are reviewed by art curator and critic Shaun Caton:

The seemingly alien terra incognita so redolent in Max Franosch's recent small paintings would suggest a mini seismic revolution in direction, technique and expression in an erstwhile climate of nullifying pretentiousness in the visual arts. An untrained and highly original artist, Franosch excavates with careful finesse his amorphic compositions from the lumpen matter of his art: paint as substance and residual ghost. Working in frenetic series Franosch daubs his boards with glutinous gobs of acrylic paint, spattering, smearing and mutilating their pristine whiteness in gestures of atavistic automatism. Once dried, black oil paint is worked into the surface then rubbed off with a scouring pad, revealing elusive and ectoplasmic blobs beneath, a stained tracery of patterns and markings that are vaguely reminiscent of the pioneering experiments in early photography, decayed antique maps and teeming biomorphic universes. This reductive process of drawing over the image produces a dense tangle of lines that scratch and score the image's underbelly, uncovering and concealing the bloated, amoebic forms that inhabit this curious work. The concrete greyness hints at an urban preoccupation with a mutable reality, an existential configuration of darkly delicious blemishes, splotches and emblems.

Nearly all of Franosch's work employs a rich chiaroscuro. Silvery cocoon-like structures hatch from these geological anomalies like reanimated fossils. Each painting is like a layer of shale uniquely indented and embossed with the unintelligible glyphs, and the fingerprints of a lost pre-linguistic society, split and cracked open to divulge its lexicon of arcane knowledge. These partial views evoke visions of imaginary ice : volcanic floes on distant planets, transmitted back to earth by space probes with alarming realism.

A sophisticated excursion into colour demonstrates that Franosch is an artist of acute sensitivity. His various tints of the same yellow hue form tractable islets and isthmus, resembling an aerial landscape view in miniature. The yellow is embossed and embellished into the plateau of the painting. Searing, caustic and illuminated it evokes biological reference points. Meeting the melting thought processes in an articulation between brain, eye and hand we arrive in an unknown land, where the only maps are the paintings themselves.

Much of the success of these works relies on an ability to inspire such diverse and metamorphic rumination in the eye of the beholder. To awaken us from a purely static visual encounter with the picture plane and invite us into the picture's palpitating fleshiness, its monochrome palette and propensity for poetic osmosis. Franosch is unconcerned with making narratives (virtually all his paintings are untitled). Neither is he interested in aesthetically palatable harmonies or "pretty pictures". He eschews convention and topical notions of the gimmick, rarely looking at the work of other artists for the camaraderie of creative justification by comparison. Instead, he introduces something of the bravery of the iconoclast to render his abstractions with a determined physicality not unlike the spontaneous and visceral aesthetics of the 1950s taschiste painters: Henri Michaux, Georges Mathieu and the art of anonymous Zen Buddhist calligraphers. There is a distinct quality of stillness and silence borne of profound contemplation in these paintings. The paint is manipulated to such an extent as to reveal Franosch's own metaphysical topography and the paintings reflect his own primordial field study — as much about breathing as they are about furtive animal utterance. In making images that defy intellectual ownership and which employ the simultaneous paradox of making and destroying, the artist deposits subtle and often violent traces of his own being, made visible to us in these engagingly potent and memorable paintings. In his own words Franosch epitomises this aesthetic, "Make your mind blank and let everything take its course."

© 2002 Shaun Caton