Maxvoao — French artist Maxime Velhinho De Araujo — has a gift for the polite apocalypse. In The Soft Collapse of Familiar Ground, twenty images long, mid-century America doesn’t end; it gently loses its grip. A man in a grey suit rises off his lawn mid-chore, mower abandoned, while his wife waves from the porch like he’s off to work. Families picnic on hillsides while walls of cloud the size of weather fronts lean in over the grass.
Nothing here screams. The palette stays ice-cream — pink Cadillacs, mint houses, peach skies — and the disasters are all in the physics: cars driving across water, houses shrinking into the sky, an endless supermarket aisle, a porch swing hanging from a cloud. It’s liminal, nostalgic and quietly wrong, the familiar ground of the American suburb dissolving at walking pace. The collapse, when it comes, will apparently be very well dressed.