Painter Maximilian Toth takes figurative subjects—like soccer players, poolside parties, or adolescent troublemakers—and renders them in a trademark semi-abstract style, creating flattened, near-monochrome black compositions with white highlights and outlines. Toth works on unstretched canvas, both to engage more viscerally in the creation of his intensely linear compositions, and also to allow him the power of cropping his images after he completes them. “I feel like no matter how hard I try to make a composition new and fresh I am yet to find one that, even when planned out, can’t be improved by cutting a few inches off,” he says. Toth’s signature style has its roots in childhood memories of blackboard drawings; the narratives of his paintings are at once nostalgic, dynamic, and unresolved. “I try to find those mundane moments that carry a seed of something bigger,” he says.