Max Sheppard

These entities by Max Sheppard bring an eclectic tone to the room they hang in. They are units of component parts that have their founding moment in the pieces of driftwood the artist discovers on beaches and marshes. He continues their spontaneous origination by working closely with the surfaces of the found materials: using paint only for partial coverage, Max reveals rather than covers the texture of the wood. They put a fresh spin on ‘painting nature’, as hybrid assemblages generated by human and natural processes in a tentative harmony. Remaining untitled evokes this transitional zone – like the tidal area of the coast – that the artist plumbs. It’s delightful to see how the pieces slot together – as an abstracted portrait of a puzzle? In the vein of Kurt Schwitters’ dada-ist and constructivist works, these pieces emphasise simplicity. Max uses counterpoised directions of movement to construe a dynamic composition. At times it seems the elements have been captured in transit, as if in a digital game of tessellating shapes. In their colouring and composition these works are painterly, but in their dimensionality, they are sculptural: another axis. At other times it seems as if the artist has made that sidelined shell of a painting, the frame, into the content of the work, its raison d’être.