Max Gómez Canle
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1972
Born in Buenos Aires and trained at the National School of Fine Arts “Prilidiano Pueyrredón,” the figure that best describes Max Gómez Canle’s relationship with painting is that of the virtuoso archaeologist. A body of work made up of discoveries and exhumations gradually forms a vast visual corpus—a single series of parts that are added and layered over time, in episodes that weave internal connections, detours, continuities, and survivals across various pictorial traditions.
Max Gómez Canle’s career is marked by the consistency and depth of a practice understood as the continuous fabrication of a point of view. A prodigy in his use of color and surface, the artist works toward the production of strangeness. From his panoramas marked by polyhedrons to the use of gold leaf as an ornamental medium of expression, his work draws from art history and contemporary visual culture as an endless reservoir of imaginary fragments—open to reworking, recontextualization, and hybridization. The result is a gaze—or rather, an ethics of seeing. Though his sources vary (from Renaissance masters to Flemish painting, from art booklets to surrealist and metaphysical references, from the local tradition of abstract painting to the digital visuality of the present), his painting always seeks to disrupt the common ways in which the relationship between the eye and its surroundings is established. Whether by generating natural landscapes tainted with geometry, aerial views suspended between the human and the animal, or perspectives that merge the technical tools of high painting with the experience of the gamer—across a variety of supports, including stone, wood, or canvas—Gómez Canle’s work is crossed by a double current: on one hand, the idea that painting can contain everything and relinquish its symbolic privilege among the formats of historical visibility; and on the other, the conviction that there is still something sacred in the act of painting.
His work has been featured in numerous international fairs and biennials, as well as exhibited in various galleries and institutions in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. It is also part of several international collections, both public and private.