Each painting in Max Lawrence White’s Variations on a Theme is at the junction of reason and unreason in the way of a fugue or jazz riff. His practice is perverse. At once random yet ritualistic.

Ritual aligns with random in the unpredictable availability of paints which he sources only from the Bunnings cart of miss-tint pots. These are the only paints he will use. Depending on the whim of market forces, mixer error and decorating trends, paints can be lights, darks, primary colours or pastels, flat or gloss, acrylic or enamel and occasionally, metallic. The artist prepares and documents his own library of colour swatches painted on the backs of salvaged drink coasters to facilitate the ultimate selection of colours for compositions.

Each work is different in its permutations, yet its fundamentals are the same. Composition possibilities are endless. Like a pianist at a keyboard the artist implements a cut and paste style and technique. A choreography of place and put.

Music was and still is part of Max Lawrence White’s life. He grew up playing drums and guitar and listens to music of all genres, so a musical analogy is not inconsistent with his works.  In their rhythms and musicality, pattern recognition, chromatic scale with colours both dissonant and harmonious, varying pitch, syncopation and shift of accent, or in a deliberately contrary atonal, achromatic approach. If a small painting is likened to an impromptu, to an etude; a triptych is symphonic in form and scale.

Collage is at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century art history and of our pervasive pixel-based contemporary digital visual vernacular, and is integral to Max Lawrence White’s art. He toys with colour theory, largely throwing it out, but adopts the rigorous technique of meticulously hand-painted bands of colour of hard-edge abstraction. Geometry as diamonds, triangles, rectangles, squares echo in his paintings with architecture; of skylines, and spatial relationships, and form driven by colour.

With this latest body of work Max Lawrence White continues his adventure with colour and the myriad possibilities of composition: each painted collage a tiny finite rendition of the infinite…

Barbara Dowse, Curator

Barbara Dowse, Curator

Max Lawrence White is a Melbourne based artist whose practice is primarily concerned with painting. White completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT in 2011 and went on to complete an Honours degree in Fine Art at the Victorian College of The Arts in 2012. White’s practice is centred on colour and its tendency to be inexhaustible within its combinations, readings and meanings. Through his works he aims to present an unconventional experience and a challenge to how the viewer perceives colour.

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