Max Gómez Canle

Gómez Canle builds a work methodology that implies a local way of seeing, making and understanding painting: he finds in the history of art and western visual culture an infinite reservoir of images that he reinterprets, quotes accurately and combines with each other and with his own forms. In his works, the artist reproduces fragments, backgrounds and characters, sometimes from paintings of the Italian Renaissance as well as from the Flemish school that he finds in old art encyclopedias.
In his work Gómez Canle dislocates the known. He refers to paradigmatic works of the tradition of geometric abstraction in Argentine art and includes in his paintings allusions to elements such as video games or emojis; he interchanges historical references, mountain landscapes that are populated or run into cut-out shapes to situations in which he desacralizes the paintings of the past. Gómez Canle's production can be thought of as a system or a single large work that continuously adds episodes or new parts. His exhibitions usually present anthological formats and spiral chronologies where the artist revisits his previous works and, at the same time, projects his work towards new horizons.
Gómez Canle, a virtuoso oil painter, is a student of ancient techniques that have fallen into disuse, such as leaf gilding and painting on stone. He conceives the practice of painting as a reflection on painting itself and the forms of visuality throughout history. Between brushstrokes, the artist poses questions or working principles that put in check the constitution of the painting, understood as the body of the image, and challenges himself to disrupt it or to bring the eyes of the beholder into the frame. These are almost impossible goals that, nevertheless, result in a series of works that attempt to achieve them.