Text: Juan Carlos Jiménez Abarca (2024)
Max experiments with character design and creation. He uses an opposing and complementary narrative, where a variety of birds show their colours and suggest personalities, while the crows inhabit a more severe atmosphere, inclined to greater symbolism. He explores two narrative poles – Romantic Comedy and Tragedy – whose references are not exclusively literary but also cinematic and television.
In Raven’s Revenge, ravens are associated with stories of stalking, supremacy, mystery and darkness. Through expressive gestures, chiaroscuro and specific objects, narrative possibilities are opened in each scene, suggesting a sinister and dangerous atmosphere that does not hide its literary sources.
Romantic Comedy Watercolors is the narrative opposite –although also complementary– to Raven’s Revenge. These birds could come from a television series that takes place in a neighborhood with a swimming pool, a setting conducive to love affairs and tragicomic situations.
In its own way, each narrative extreme belongs to the broad spectrum of that already trans-historical phenomenon that is Romanticism: the awareness of the world is given by the emotions and the traces that life experiences leave, and that oscillate between comedy and tragedy. There is here a reading of the world from the theatrical perspective that in turn does not hide the anthropomorphization of nature. In Romantic Comedy Watercolors the birds are clever, good-natured, distracted or dangerous according to the human attributes that we place on them. Their plumage is expressive clothing, they are language and history made with color.
