MAX THE VIRUS

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Max is a virus who reaches out.

He arrived at the tail end of 2021, when the word virus had become synonymous with the pandemic. Everyone was exhausted by it, so I wanted to push the other way: to take the shape everybody had learned to dread and hand it back as a character you were pleased to see.

A friend pushed me to try it. I was experimenting with one of the new AI platforms, generating virus forms and throwing most of them away, until one image stopped me. I redrew it, refined it, and kept going until he became Max The Virus.

His whole thing is the arms. He reaches out, literally, across a wall, around a corner, over a doorway, and wherever he can he reaches out to people too. A virus spreads by contact. So does street art.

LEAKE STREET

Max does most of his living at Leake Street, the legal graffiti tunnel beneath Waterloo Station. The walls there change constantly, which suits him. He is never painted onto a blank surface. He arrives into whatever is already there, works around it, reacts to it, and is eventually painted over by somebody else.

That has produced breakthroughs, steady progress, and some genuinely interesting failures. Every one of them teaches Max something about how to inhabit a space, and more importantly how to connect the people inside it.

maxthevirus.com · @maxthevirus · marccraig.co.uk · itvoids.com

DIGITAL AND BEYOND

Max also works on the iPad, which lets him go somewhere the walls cannot: into detail, and into art history.

He reinterprets iconic works, the Mona Lisa among them, not as parody but as re-energising. The same painting, rebuilt in his visual language, connecting a present day tunnel to a five hundred year old panel. Big walls give him scale. The iPad gives him intricacy. Between the two he covers most of what I want to explore.

THE LEAKE STREET PORTRAITS

The best part of working in that tunnel is the people. Leake Street is not just paint on walls. It is a constant traffic of inventive, unpredictable, generous people, and they have shaped my work more than the surface ever did.

So Max is portraying them. A portrait project that, like its close cousin RESIST AND REACT, has no end, because it wants to keep the vibe going.

Mona Lisa, rebuilt in Max's visual language on iPad.

A Leake Street portrait, working with the wall it arrived into.

A VIRUS SPREADS BY CONTACT. SO DOES STREET ART.

maxthevirus.com · @maxthevirus · marccraig.co.uk · itvoids.com