SANTA FE, NM.- The work of Max Cole feels elemental. Like the clean white bone of a deer found on a trail, a few chips of ancient mosaic uncovered buried beneath a street, or the crystalline crust of salt on the shore of a drying lake, these paintings seem composed of the essentials, of what is left behind when all noise and complication is stripped away.

Pale Horse presents a selection of Max Cole’s work from over the course of her career as an artist, with paintings from the seventies through the twenty-teens. While Cole had begun exhibiting her work earlier, it was in the early to mid-seventies that she began working with raw canvas in earnest, and as she says, “realized that I needed to stop exhibiting completely and shut myself in the studio away from all distractions so I could define my direction, which I did for about two years.” Cole emerged from this time with a direction that she has carried forward for five decades, continuing, as she puts it, her artistic “search of unknown territory.”

This new direction also led to success. A show at a gallery in Los Angeles in 1976 led to an important and formative group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called New Abstract Painting. From there Cole found representation in Manhattan and created a studio in New York City. During the next decades she also showed her work in Europe and even lived and had a studio there for a period. Eventually, however, she felt the pull to return to the States, and, after a few side-journeys (including a residency in Roswell, where the title piece, Pale Horse, was created), Cole returned permanently to the southwest, not far from her native Oklahoma panhandle. No matter where Cole roamed, however, her work continued to chase the spare and ascetic spiritual explorations she began all those decades before.

So this is how Cole has always worked – with essentials. Her art is pared down to the barest foundations of visual language. Her palette is primarily black and white, with shades of gray and neutral tans or raw canvas sometimes coming through. Color, with its emotional freight, has never interested her. And her canvases are spare – primarily composed of lines and minimal geometrical forms. The most characteristic element of her painting is the fine and precise making of tiny marks across her canvases, layers upon layers of razor-thin lines. In the micro view these lines are like small stitches, or even the most elemental rudiments of human language (a vertical mark, counting one). In the macro view one sees this accumulation of marks build, weave, aggregate, and flow across the canvas, forming larger tonal patterns of horizontal bands.

This restriction to such strict and minimal parameters might, in the abstract, suggest that these works will be severe, reductive, or simplistic. Instead, they illustrate the seemingly paradoxical experience of infinite expression, variety, and spaciousness that can be found within rigorous strictures. The hand-drawn, imperfect quality of Cole’s lines serve to infuse each painting with the breathing reality of the artist as present within the work. Her experience, her effort, her energy are recorded here on canvas – and there is a unique vibration and energetic quality that suffuses the work.

Black, white. Mark, canvas. Space. Light and shadow. These are the essentials of a practice of painting that has been honed over decades of careful, deliberate work. Cole’s art arises from a place of deep quiet, the patient journey of an artist toward expression that transcends the personal. If you wait, if you look, you might just catch a glimpse of those shimmering essentials that lie just on the other side of ordinary sight.

– Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

MAX COLE: Pale Horse
September 5-28, 2025
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
View the catalog here.