ESSAYS & SELECTED REVIEWS
A CONVERSATION
By Cuauhtémoc Medina
A Forest, Reprinted from Sala 10, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), 2022
Every investment is also an ideology. In A Forest, Max de Esteban confronts us with the vision of the world of speculators…
ESTÉTICA DE LA EXTINCIÓN
By Iván de la Nuez
Reprinted from Estética de la Extinción, Ed. Turner, 2022
Al contrario de lo previsto por el famoso dictum de Marx, hoy los hechos parecen suceder primero como farsa para repetirse, después, como tragedia…
THE WORLD WITHOUT US
By Walter Benn Michaels
White Noise, Reprinted from Estética de la Extinción, Ed. Turner, 2022
Max de Esteban’s White Noise photographs tell a story and express a desire. The story is apocalyptic not exactly the end of the world…
THE BIOCYBERNETIC FOREST
By W.J.T. Mitchell
A Forest, Reprinted from Sala 10, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) 2022
The artist Max de Esteban “asks” a machine to take a self-portrait. Not just any machine, but a computer…
MEME-SWARM AND MICROTRADING
By Franco “BIFO” Berardi
Reprinted from ILLWILLEDITIONS, 2021
As Year 2 of the Age of the Pandemic begins, the final battle between humankind and unfettered capitalism is turning ugly…
LAS CENIZAS DE NUESTRA ERA
By Andrea Soto Calderón
White Noise, Reprinted from Estética de la Extinción, 2021
En White Noise, Max de Esteban realiza una investigación crítica de las implicaciones y consecuencias que comporta la posibilidad de la extinción humana…
A VISUAL INTERPRETATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY CHAOS
By Franco “BIFO” Berardi
Twenty Red Lights, Reprinted from CGAC – Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 2019
The installation of Max is an attempt to visualise the financial dynamics…
TWENTY RED LIGHTS
By Diana Padrón & Lorenza Pignatti
Reprinted from La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, 2018
Digital technologies are leading us to a profound and accelerated transformation of our world. The Rolling Stones reflected this precipitate shift…
I DON’T UNDERSTAND
By Bill Kouwenhoven
Binary Code, 2018
“¡Yo tampoco entiendo nada del mundo!” Max de Esteban. When Max and I last talked about the feeling of being overwhelmed….
A CONVERSATION
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Michel Feher and Max de Esteban
Curator and moderator: Valentín Roma
Video – Virreina Centre de la Imatge, 2017
SYNTHETIC COLOURS
By Franco “BIFO” Berardi
Reprinted from Twenty Red Lights, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge 2017
The world may be viewed as the sphere of intersection of countless psycho-dynamic trajectories of imagination and projection…
BRAVE NEW WORLD REDUX
By Michel Feher
Reprinted from Twenty Red Lights, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge 2017
On first analysis, our brave new capitalist world can be traced to Milton Friedman’s pronouncement quoted below and drawn...
INTERVIEW
By Crisia Miroiu
Reprinted from Fotoviny Magazine
August 2017
I think one of the beauties of photography is that it is “outside-in” and humbler in its ambitions…
SILO DREAMS
By Paul Wombell
Binary Code, 2017
Silos teeming with corn, wheat or soybeans become death traps when grain cascades out of control, asphyxiating or crushing their victims…
INTERVIEW
By Hamidah Glasgow
Reprinted from The Center for Fine Art Photography, July 2017
Well…it all started in 2011 when I arrived at the conviction that traditional photography inadequately represented contemporaneity…
INTERVIEW
By Zone Zero
Reprinted from Zone Zero, August 2016
Appropriation and remix have a long artistic tradition, beginning with Picasso’s collages. As early as the 1920s…
MULTILAYERED WORKS
By Pavel Banka
Reprinted from Fotofest Biennal, 2016
The work of Max de Esteban made a strong impression on me the very first time I came across it. Formally, his photographs evoked the work of Robert Heinecken…
ABOUT THE COVER
By Lyle Rexer
Reprinted from Photograph Magazine, 2015
Like a fault line in the surface of appearances, photo collage opens up in periods of social stress and political obfuscation…
THE SINGULAR OBJECTIVE
By Valentin Roma
Reprinted from Propositions, La Fabrica, 2015
When we look at a photograph two doubts suddenly arise: Where are we looking at it from? What discourses might enable us to read it?…
INTERVIEW
By Archivo Magazine
Reprinted from Archivo Magazine, September 2015
Since I was a child I am passionately interested in art. I think I was thirteen when I first saw photos…
IN CHIAROSCURO
By Rafael Argullol
Reprinted from Propositions, La Fabrica, 2015
If I had to summarize Max de Esteban’s latest work in a single phrase, I would write: “unsettling interlude.” This is the predominant sensation…
HEADS WILL ROLL Review
By William Meyers
Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal, 2015
Max de Esteban, born in Barcelona in 1959 and educated at Stanford University, is a peculiarly protean artist: His first major body of work…
HEADS WILL ROLL Review
By Loring Knoblauch
Reprinted from Collector Daily, 2015
As its title implies, Max de Esteban’s new series Heads Will Roll isn’t wildly optimistic about the future of humanity. His densely layered and atmospheric…
THE ENTRAILS OF THE SOUL
By Félix de Azúa
Reprinted from Propositions, La Fabrica, 2015
Is it possible to see the soul of a dead machine? I believe so; or at least I hold that we can try to get a glimpse at what in principle is invisible…
THE QUESTION CONCERNING WHAT IS FLUID AND UNSTABLE
By Laura González Flores
Reprinted from Propositions, La Fabrica, 2015
There are two types of images that allow us to understand photography. For one, there are those whose…
PHOTOCAPITALISM IS AMONG US
By Carles Guerra
Reprinted from Heads will Roll, Hatje Cantz, 2014
The current debate on photography is about to eliminate the remains of a practice that, since the nineteenth century…
INTERESTING TIMES, INDEED!
By Bill Kouwenhoven
Reprinted from Heads will Roll, Hatje Cantz, 2014
It is taken as gospel truth that there is an ancient Chinese curse, perhaps dating to the era of Warring States of about 475 BC to 221 BC…