Max Gómez Canle
Bio
Max Gómez Canle was born in Buenos Aires in 1972. In the mid 90's he specialized in painting at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón. He worked as a carpenter, set designer, restorer, cook, craftsman, marker, lyricist and videographer among other things. He copied paintings of all possible styles. He was awarded in the contest “10 years of Bola de Nieve” voted by artists and received the “Ignacio Pirovano” award to the young artist of the year 2007 granted by the Argentine Association of Art Critics. In 2009 his work Ventana was selected to cover the facade of the Del Plata Building on 9 de Julio Avenue in Buenos Aires. He obtained the arteBA-FLORA scholarship to travel to Colombia and won the Andreani Award in 2013 and the Klemm in 2014. He received the Konex Platinum Painting Award 2022. His latest exhibitions were La tregua del agua (Museo del barro, Asunción, 2023), Peinar la playa (Udagawa House, Urayasu, 2023), Cucchi Gómez Canle (The National Ejemplar Gallery, Salsomaggiore Terme, 2023), Fuera de lugar (Galería Casa Triángulo, San Pablo, 2022), Vivir así: sin palabras (Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte, Buenos Aires, 2020), El salón de los caprichos (Museo de arte moderno de Buenos Aires, 2019), La distancia termina en el barranco (Galería Casa Triángulo, San Pablo, 2017), Condición y cabeza (Fundación Klemm, Buenos Aires, 2016), Fisonomía del tiempo (Flora ars+natura, Bogotá, 2014).
Statement
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in Argentine art and includes in his paintings allusions to elements such as video games or emojis; he interchanges historical references, mountain landscapes that are populated or run into cut-out shapes to situations in which he desacralizes the paintings of the past.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.
