Max Petts
Proscenium | Xxijra Hii | April 18th - May 17th 2025
Xxjira Hii is pleased to present Proscenium, the debut solo exhibition of London based artist Max Petts.
Proscenium, short for proscenium arch, is the frame or arch separating a stage from the auditorium and through which the action of a play is viewed. Comprising five paintings and a sculpture, the exhibition continues Petts’ longstanding interest in framing (in its various complex forms) and the structural relations between images and objects that allow meaning to develop.
Gallery as stage, object as prop, looking as event.
The paintings - a noun Petts playfully insists upon - begin as pencil drawings and evolve through a variety of materials, methods and mistakes; tempera craft paint, coloured pencil, watercolour, crayon, coffee; traced, rubbed, painted, spilled. Beginning with a simple border of masking tape, each work employs manifold framing strategies to meld a variety of historical and personal references. The imagery is pulled from varied sources such as theatrical stage diagrams from instructional YouTube videos, phonics worksheets teaching the letter ‘P’ (completed by Petts’ nephew), a sixteenth century engraving, Disney illustrations, advertising, and children’s colouring books. These seemingly disparate elements form a layered visual ecosystem where signs and notions are shuffled into proximity with one another and nuanced relationships occur.
At the core Petts’ practice is a concern with how art is digested and the trophic chains that ensue via images and language. Once complete, each painting is broken into fragments, scanned, digitally reassembled, and printed at a 1:1 scale. The ‘original’ fragments are then buried beneath their facsimile, framed, and nailed shut; a gesture underscored by the materials list - this is not just a print - as well as the preposition Dead in the titles: suggesting an afterlife of images, suspended between presence and reproduction, as well as the death of the ‘original’. This procedure has evolved as a method of making and unmaking; to interrogate the underlying structures of looking and thinking and the myriad forms of labour and technology at play.
All artworks are preceded and/or succeeded by (digital) documentation. By overtly fictionalising the work, the literal laying of copy over original, the substituting of the real with a sign of the real, Petts intercepts this process. The result renders the viewer present with absence when encountering the work in person, and doubles this absence - image over image - when viewing documentation. This raises the question of where the value lies: the physical commodity, its power to circulate via images, or what is in between.
When describing this process Petts often alludes to On Exactitude in Science, a one-paragraph story by Jorge Luis Borges that recounts an empire where cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice.
Two works in Proscenium contain explicit cartographic references: Dead Proscenium i features Tissot’s indicatrix - a polka dot-esque tool designed to quantify the level of distortion in map projections - and Dead Fool appropriates a sixteenth century engraving colloquially known as the Fools Cap Map of the World - a jester's cap with a cordiform (heart or leaf-shaped) world map where the face would be. The latter being combined with an appropriated 1960’s airline advertisement selling our ‘shrinking world’ as well as the logo for the London A-Z (the only physical map Petts has ever used).
Borges’ fable, famously used by Jean Baudrillard to elaborate his concept of hyperreality, has its origins in a little known work by Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, where in the fantasy world of Fairyland there exists a map on the scale of a ‘mile to the mile’. Carroll’s legacy is further referenced in Dead Rabbit Holes, a work that utilises imagery from illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to straddle the iconic trope that has descended from it: becoming absorbed in something, often to the point of losing track of time or purpose, and potentially ending up in a strange or complex situation.
Over the course of the exhibition the scene changes; paintings move like props between their rightful place on the walls and being leant or poised against them. This speaks to their object nature; things with fronts and backs that can withhold, and offers some resistance to the flatness that wall based works so easily succumb to.
The central prop in the exhibition, Cookie - Bird - Alphabet is a stack of ultra processed supermarket bought cookies secured upon a bronze armature: a semi-polished cast of a 3d printed replica of Constantin Brancusi’s iconic bronze work Bird in Space. It changes as the exhibition unfolds, entering a performative cycle of decay and refreshment. This absurd act prioritises the essential structural support required for the work to function, and explores the tensions between the seen and unseen, mass culture and art, ‘real’ things and copies, difficulty and ease. This tension brings about an ambiguity of the material agency and its reference to environment, histories, trust and the resulting facts and/or fictions.
The intervention in the door and window of the gallery illustrates the negative space of a proscenium arch. Made with the masking tape that frames each painting, the arch obscures what is normally transparent and marks the threshold where fiction and reality converge. This is the line between the ‘real world’ and the gallery; the gateway into another mode of attention. Can this attention - looking - continue on both sides? And which side of this line are you on?
The works in Proscenium explore the role of language and its relationship to materials (ingredients) and images. In doing so, they challenge the categories that structure our understanding of the world and confront the complexities of drawing such lines.
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