ABOUT

Max Olivete (1985, Rio de Janeiro) lives and works in the city where he was born. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Languages from the Graduate Program in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (PPGAV-UFRJ) and develops a painterly investigation centered on urban experience and the landscapes of the Latin American periphery, understood not as an illustrative theme, but as a sensitive and structural field of thought.
In his work, landscape is not a backdrop — it is the protagonist. Yet it is a landscape marked by a strange condition: the presence of absence. Human figures are rarely seen, but everything suggests that someone has just left. A gate left ajar, the silent street after the noise, a rail that still seems to vibrate. There is always a trace, a mark, a suspension.
Max constructs scenarios in which time settles like matter. Soot, a recurring element in his research, operates not merely as a chromatic choice, but as a symbolic and physical index of urban combustion — residue of labor, traffic, and everyday wear. By incorporating it into the surface, the artist inscribes a material memory of the city into the painting, as if each plane carried the friction of the bodies that once passed through it.
If the tradition of landscape has historically been associated with contemplation, here it presents itself as an experience of latency. The wires cutting across the sky, the marked walls, the voids between buildings, the tracks crossing the frame establish an atmosphere of imminence. Something has happened — or is about to happen. The viewer is invited to inhabit this interval.
Without resorting to easy dramatization or the exoticization of the periphery, he develops a poetics of restraint. His paintings do not shout; they persist. They are spaces where silence is dense and where human absence becomes a narrative force. In the end, we do not merely contemplate a landscape — we are traversed by it, as if suddenly realizing that the city remains there, breathing, even after someone has exited the scene.

Martha Ortiz.

Exhibitions:

Solo

2019

- É FIM DE LINHA, É FOGO, É FODA! – Galeria Macunaíma, RJ.

Group Exhibitions

2011

- BRANCO BÁSICO - Espaço Vórtice EBA/UFRJ, RJ.

2012

- Exposição dos alunos do curso de fundamentação – EAV/Parque Lage, RJ.

2015

- COMO SER CIVILIZADO - Estudio Dezenove, RJ.

- RETALHOS – Canto da Carambola, RJ.

- So.Ma. Soda Aw convida Max Olivete – Atelier 251, RJ.

2016

- #FestaDePintores - Fábrica da Bhering, RJ.

2017

- PROXIMAL – Galeria KM7, RJ.

2018

- STEDELIJKE VERBINDINGEN – N.O, Bélgica.

2019

- PATIFARIA! – Corredor Azul – Reitoria/UFRJ, RJ.

2020

- PATIFARIA II! – Espaço Poético Titocar, RJ.

2022

- Ver-Ão Sal-Ão - Oasis Centro Cultural, RJ. - Paradoxos da Paisagem: Ações e Processos - Galpão Pós-EBA, RJ.

2023

- Quadrantes da Miragem - Ateliê 31, RJ.

- Mancha - Piccola Arena, Petrópolis, RJ.