Max Jansons: Desire

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Max Jansons. Jansons’ complex and multi-layered paintings engage viewers with beauty. His luscious and luxurious surfaces cloak the purposeful hand and acuity of mind and vision that are the core of his practice.

A keen student of art history, Jansons’ connection to and reverence of influential artists, movements and materials are embedded in his work. Utilizing linen primed with lead, paints ground in aged oils, pigments whose sources are now extinct, and hand cut tacks, Jansons’ employ of classical materials belies the contemporary result. With nods to great twentieth century painters such as Op Art visionary, Victor Vasarely, Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, Orphism co-founder Sonia Delaunay and Kazuo Shiraga, member of renowned Japanese avant-garde collectives Gutai and Zero-kai, Jansons embraces the roots of his practice, but does not emulate. Jansons redefines and reinterprets the skills presented by his predecessors and creates an original vision that explores the historical tenets of still life, abstract geometry, light and color.

Jansons' varied and nuanced application of paint is tactile and absorbing. With clear evidence of stroke and hand, the surfaces of Jansons' paintings are fluid and active. Whether optical plays of line and form, densely populated floral still lives, traditional portraiture, or explorations of subtly shifting color abstractions, connectivity exists within Jansons works regardless of subject. Saturated by vibrant color and the touch of the artist’s process, Jansons’ canvases evoke a visceral response as well as an intellectual one.