Photograph by Sarah Carmody
Gardens bloom with greenish marigolds and menthol cigarettes; blue roses squirt milk like cosmic trick carnations; a headless bird sits on a branch beneath a cartouche containing the silhouetted profile of a porn star. Designed to overwhelm in every way, Max Key’s paintings are, as he says, “large and loud.” (When he showed at Hoffman LaChance this past spring, it took just six canvases to fill the main gallery.) They are also crammed with images—posies, trees, curlicues, fruit, scallops, polka dots, doves—pulled from domestic décor. But, like the maddening patterns in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” his motifs are full of itchy psychological subtext.
Key, who grew up in Collinsville, just returned to St. Louis after living in Kansas City for a decade or so. He earned a degree in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in ’96, though for his first gallery showings he made sculptures: minimalist wooden boxes with light-up panels modeled on Cold War supercomputers. He briefly lived in Chicago, Oklahoma City and New York but finally moved back to Kansas City, where he began working for a decorative-painting company.
After spending his days applying glazes and painting gilded arabesques on other people’s walls, Key began filling his paintings with subverted decorative imagery, applying glazing techniques to his canvases and transforming those berries, birds and flourishes into something deeper and stranger.
“I liked the idea of using these passive motifs, like birds and flowers, and trying to give them more of a humanity,” Key says. “Pregnant birds, birds with no heads, flowers that morph into cancer-looking forms ... and then to have them interact with one another ... ”
He began researching passé interior-design trends, especially the “overdose of patterns” and general gaudiness that held sway during the ’70s and ’80s.
“That’s really how the metallics, the golds and the silvers, came in,” he explains, “which is taboo for art-making, for some reason—I like that. The same with the paintings with the cigarettes in them. I’m always trying to push that.”
But look carefully at Key’s busy paintings and you’ll also see a respect for tradition, with references to Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Art Nouveau and Linnaean illustrations; he has a deep admiration for the old masters, for straight-up landscapes and the still life. With this love of landscapes, it would be surprising if a change of scenery didn’t affect Key’s work, though he says that his paintings were changing before he left Kansas City. He calls “Seasonal Divorce,” which dates back to ’05, the first painting in this series “that actually had a subject matter.” It’s an image of two trees, one bluish and wilted, the other bristling with berries and bleeding fruit.
“They definitely are starting to get ... not angrier, but more drippy, bloody, less passive,” he says of his paintings. “This is the male-female thing. These are supposed to be curlers,” he says, pointing out a nest of pink circles at the crown of the fruit tree. “It’s that stereotypical Edith and Archie Bunker kind of relationship.”
Although Key’s reverence for the old masters and his mellow demeanor wouldn’t be the first two things you’d guess about him after looking at his wild, kaleidoscopic paintings, his work ethic is impossible to miss. He doesn’t just find the fortitude to cover 10-foot-long canvases; in Kansas City he averaged two or three gallery shows a year, won awards and sold paintings to Sprint and Review Publishing along the way.
Key has just started a business here with a friend and is maintaining the same rigorous schedule he’s kept up for the past several years, doing decorative painting during the day and then working on his art at night.
“I don’t sleep very much,” he says waggishly, “but I do sleep.”
To see Key’s work, get a list of current exhibitions or contact the artist, visit maxkey.org.
