Maja Marx approaches painting as a practice essentially concerned with the optical activation of surface. She transcribes the gentle folds of cloth, folded and creased paper, the corrugations of cardboard, onto the linen of her canvasses. Insofar as these paintings are studies of objects, they are also arguably still lives.
However, the fixation on surface very literally transcends both the genre as well as the boundaries of the object itself. The transcription of surface detail in these paintings is an act that combines the mark making of painterly practice with the act of writing. Writing …