Interview with Max Estenger
by Matthew Deleget

The following interview took place in August 2017 and was published the exhibition catalogue Max Estenger: New Paintings, Norte Maar, 2017.

Matthew Deleget: We’ve known each other for years now, so I’m really excited we finally have a chance to spend some quality time together discussing your work and ideas. You are rare among artists in that you’ve been thoroughly committed to making reductive, abstract work for more than three decades. How has your thinking about abstraction evolved during this time? What were your concerns at the outset and what’s motivating you right now? And what have you learned along the way?

Max Estenger: That’s an interesting question because I’ve rarely thought about “reduction” in any profound way. My initial work was most informed by Robert Ryman's paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, paintings that referenced the support and how that support was fastened to the wall, such as in my See-Through Paintings from the early 1990s. In fact, I think I’ve been wary of the reductive endgame especially in terms of the monochrome tradition as seen in the work of the Radical Painters. I do admire a lot of that work, but I reacted to it by thinking more in terms of exploding and fragmenting that monochrome and creating something else. So if anything, I’ve thought more in terms of building out than reduction.

I have always thought that abstraction was as epochal as Renaissance illusionism and if that tradition could last 500 years or so, abstraction could yield at least 200 years (laughs). We are in abstraction’s second century and I see no reason why interesting, fresh, and inventive work can’t still come from what started in 1912.

Flavin Judd was speaking at a panel recently and he spoke about his father’s motivations and essentially said that for Donald Judd the reason for making art was because there was no one else making his work. That if there was work close enough to what he was doing, then there would be no need to make his own. I thought that was a succinct and true way of expressing why some make art. It wasn’t that Judd had to make art because he was an artist. It’s just that he had to make a specific type of art. I totally identify with that.

In these past decades, I have learned that inspiration can come and go. I’m not one of those that can just keep cranking out stuff because I have to. I need to have something to say. It has to feel that there’s a necessity for this work within the context of art. Obviously, there’s no absolute necessity for any art ever.

MD: I often wonder that myself. Your work can assume a number of different formats. Whether hanging on the wall, sitting directly on the floor, or installed in relation to the particulars of a given space, your work possesses a strong sense of clarity and directness. You usually present materials as themselves, unedited. Linen is linen, wood is wood, sheetrock is sheetrock. This takes a lot of courage. How did you arrive at this strategy, to just let things be what they are? I imagine the precepts of Minimalism may have played a role here.

ME: (laughs) You say “courage.” Folly might be another word, but I think that certain materials left alone can be very seductive. And other times partially painting sections and letting some parts of the material untouched can be just as interesting. It’s not a set program and certainly Judd, Fred Sandback, and Dan Flavin dealing with materiality qua materiality were an important precedent. I think initially I had this kind of hard-assed materiality that I have been letting go of over the last 25 years. Getting back to the material itself, I was also inspired by the example of Morris Louis and all that raw, unprimed canvas.

MD: It’s really exciting and also somewhat unusual that you cite Morris Louis. I don’t hear his name mentioned all that often among painters. What is it about Louis’ late work that holds your attention? Have any of those qualities been reflected in your own work or worldview over the years?

ME: I think what Louis did in that small DC townhouse over the course of his last four years is pretty remarkable. He was isolated, focused, and driven. And then he died tragically. I am still profoundly moved by his work. In terms of the work, I think the Veils are among the most audacious paintings anyone ever made. They are so strange and original. They are monumental and yet so thin and light. I think one of the paintings from this exhibition at Norte Maar, the large Red (2017) painting, is definitely aware of Louis’ Veils and his drawing with the top and bottom edges.

MD: One other quality that strikes me every time I see your work, whether newer or older, is your color usage. It reads as highly selective, acute, and buoyant. To me it feels optimistic. Tell me about your color concerns and decisions. When does a work need an applied color (or set of colors)? And how do you choose one specific color over any other one?

ME: Well, when we talk about color, that’s where the “rigor” and certainty in my work is thrown out the window. The color has been more or less consistent—high keyed, and all those other attributes you mention. And I don’t even mind the term optimistic. There’s obviously certain ideas that I have about color that I think are just very subjective.

I did an entire series of over twenty paintings using the OSHA Safety Colors (1994-95). One was recently in a Denver Museum show exploring color. But ironically, those were all colors that I liked already anyway. In the mid-2000s, I was at a sort of impasse with creating new work, and I decided that I would just do some really hedonistic color paintings with stripes, bands, and sections. This is as old a Modernist trope as there is—the stripe—but I put mine through a simple compositional progression and ended up with a group of paintings that I liked a lot. And no one would confuse them with anyone else’s stripes, not Gene Davis or Tim Bavington or Gabriele Evertz.

MD: I often think about the stripe, or the grid for that matter, as readymades. No one really “owns” them artistically. I know you grew up in Southern California. You also went to college and graduate school there. Immediately afterwards, you moved permanently to NYC in the late 1980s where you continue to live today. You might be uniquely positioned to talk about the similarities and differences between the East and West Coast reductive abstraction traditions that have evolved over the past 50 years. I’m specifically thinking about Color Field Painting, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Neo-Geo, the Abstract Classicists, Light & Space, Land Art, etc., among so many other interesting moments. What are your thoughts here? And how do you see your own work in relation to these two parallel, ongoing conversations?

ME: For me, the New York School was always paramount—everyone from Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, early Stella, Jo Baer to Robert Mangold. Mangold’s survey show at MOCA San Diego in 1985 knocked me out especially coming right at the apex of the Neo-Expressionist moment. My bible is basically that three-volume set of books called The New American Abstraction 1950-1970 that you are probably the only other person I know owns (laughs). My grad school advisor at UCSD was Sheldon Nodelman, who wrote a book Marden, Novros, Rothko: Painting in the Age of Actuality and later on a monograph on the Rothko Chapel. And I also studied a lot with the great Allan Kaprow while there.

In Southern California, Light and Space was always around, but definitely lower profile in the 80s. I was fortunate that MOCA Los Angeles and MOCA San Diego had great examples of Light and Space work. The other interesting artists for me in California besides Turrell and Irwin were people like Tony DeLap and Mary Corse in terms of painting. The Norton Simon Museum (formerly the Pasadena Museum of Art) owned a grand Ellsworth Kelly multi-panel work that I saw at age 19 and inspired me a lot. There were some galleries focused on showing abstract painting, especially the kind that we now associate with your incomparable MINUS SPACE.

Peter Halley was also important in attempting to introduce another narrative into the discourse of abstraction. I thought I had to engage that somehow, but when I moved to New York, I saw the work of Imi Knoebel at Dia in 1988. He is so under appreciated in the United States. I met people like Alan Uglow, Olivier Mosset, and Steven Parrino. It was important for me to see that you could plant your feet, take a stance, and make this kind of work. Not that it was ever going to be easy, but the urgency of that post-formalist rap as exemplified by Halley became less compelling.

A few years later in 1994, I was in my first and only “ethnic” show. My parents came to the United States in 1961 from Cuba, so I am a first generation Cuban-American. It was a group show called Cuban Presences at an Upper East Side space. One of the other artists in that show was Carmen Herrera. She was one of the most generous and kind people I had encountered in the New York scene. I loved her work. I remember strategizing with her about that show—which critics, curators to reach out to. I mentioned inviting some of my collectors and she said something like “well I don’t have any.” I thought she was joking and never brought it up again. I remember many phone conversations with her about art, but unfortunately we sort of lost touch. But obviously her example and emergence in the past decade has been really heartening and thrilling. She stuck to her guns. There was never anything but the work—tough, innovative, and beautiful. Never an appeal to “identity.” And I think she has done OK in terms of collectors. (laughs).

MD: Yes, I agree. I wish it was only ever about the work, the work, the work, but alas... Since you mentioned it, is there anything specifically Cuban about Herrera’s work? Or in your work for that matter? Is there a particular Cuban worldview or approach present here? Can a specific cultural context or values be expressed in abstraction?

ME: I can’t speak for Carmen’s work and she actually was born and raised there. I have never traveled to Cuba and I don’t think it plays out in any direct way in my work. I think there are clear instances though where cultural context has been expressed in abstraction.

MD: So much conversation about abstraction today is concerned with where abstraction has been in recent decades. It rarely discusses the innovations taking place right now, in real time. I’d like your thoughts about abstraction in the current tense, the present, and also where you think it’s all going. Where are there still opportunities – conceptually, materially, contextually, presentationally – either with your own work or with abstraction as a whole?

ME: First of all, abstraction as a whole is such a small segment of the art scene compared to anytime in the past 50 years that the intramural differences within the abstraction camp that used to be a big deal are no longer big deals. In this social media age, everyone has to “like” what everyone else is doing or so it seems (laughs). So I think instead differences are expressed through one’s artwork rather than in some critical treatise that says this or that kind of abstraction is retrograde or what have you.

When I was coming up, I definitely a lot about where my own work’s entry point was in terms of history and contemporary abstraction. I came up with the idea of critical abstract painting from a Hal Foster discussion of Ryman versus Neo-Geo. He singles out Ryman and others as engaged in a serious and critical enterprise. A type of painting, which is in historical involvement with painting’s material practices. He contrasts this to Neo-Geo and its reliance on pastiche.

I can go through each of my first few painting series and locate where I think maybe I added something fresh. But eventually that positivist thinking peters out and instead what happens is that one’s work turns into really being about its own development. I’m basically working with the visual language and parameters that I set out for myself 25 years ago.

As far as what’s been happening the past 10 years, obviously Wade Guyton’s work has received a lot of attention. He came up with this wonderful way to make a painting with printers—and fusing everything from Reinhardt to Warhol in the process. But are the resultant works that interesting as paintings? I don’t know. Jennie C. Jones is doing an interesting and weird hybrid of painting and music. There are always new materials and supports, new paints, new frameworks, and new contexts for making work.

MD: For the past 18 months, the conversations I’ve been having with artists and others at my gallery have been dominated by politics and for obvious reasons. Does abstraction have a role to play vis–à–vis our most pressing social challenges today? And more specifically, where do think abstraction will go in response to the great Orange Menace? Is abstraction still relevant? What can it contribute in the age of populism and nationalism?

ME: Obviously there is a reason why your gallery conversations have been dominated by politics and that is quite simply we have an alarming situation where the actual character of the person who is president is extremely problematic. We recognize in that person traits that we would recoil from in others and ourselves. Yet this person parades them as virtues. The other sad reason for this situation is that art talk is more and more the business of art talk. It’s a real drag.

Abstraction has had a long 100-year history with the political, whether the Russians in the 1920s and 1930s or the Supports/Surface group in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists are by and large more politically engaged than the average person. As far as abstraction, a good role model is Ad Reinhardt who was involved in the Civil Rights and anti-war struggles while still maintaining a rigorous abstract art practice. Art is art and everything else is everything else, but I think sometimes events reach such a point that of course politics overshadow art.

I find what you did physically attacking the monochrome, as a response to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, a novel way of expressing an important point of view without sacrificing any of the integrity of the object. That is not easy to do.

I don’t think we need to have an army of abstractionists fighting the Orange Menace as you suggest. Politics and art are always tricky. It’s better to do great art and great politics, but it’s almost impossible to do both together at the same time, at least in the visual arts realm.

Kaprow taught me that all artworks embody a worldview that is inextricably linked with its creator. My own work has embedded within it certain values, which I believe express a clear world view, one that could be applied to many situations and even critically vis-a-vis the current regime—transparency, facticity, and honesty of materials. Not to mention harmony, order, and simplicity.

I never want to see artists align themselves with the illiberal forces of some on the left, particularly the types who want to shut down debate on campuses, who want safe zones to censor thought and expression. I am a free speech absolutist and we make a huge mistake making the right look like the tolerant ones.