Maxim Burnett’s Industry Incarnate: Why the Aesthetic is Not an Afterthought

Photography by Reece Gibbons.

This piece is also published to my Substack.

Contemporary society has more measures to quantify our environmental crisis than ever. Yet, in the wake of fires burning through Los Angeles, the severity of which we have never seen — environmental historian Char Miller, quoted in the Guardian, cited ‘human hubris’ as a core factor in trying to control the climate crisis, where profit continued to be a priority in a landscape that ‘needs to burn, and has burned for millennia’. Human hubris: how are we to measure this? What is the root cause of our disharmony with nature, our drive and our desire to exploit? Separate from the very tangible, devastating trail left by our actions, there are psychological, cultural, and spiritual losses that might be difficult to calculate, let alone comprehend. It feels as if it’s precisely this ineffability that oil painter, Maxim Burnett, takes as his subject for his befittingly monumental triptych, Industry Incarnate. Each painting renders a different method of hyper-industrialised extraction, from an oil rig to deforestation: but it’s through opulent visual allegory, and in the artist’s own words, ‘deific’ form, that he chooses to depict them.

When I pay a visit to Burnett’s studio in preparation for his presentation at the London Art Fair, I quickly realise that ‘life imitates art’ couldn’t be more true of his surroundings. I marvel at the shelves adorned with antiques (amongst them - Anne Boleyn’s real bedpost - which he paid £5 for) and copious reference books. Each painting of the triptych stands at a different corner of the room, like individual altars. ‘If I could, I’d paint murals all over the walls, like the Bloomsbury group did’, he laughs. This meeting of lived experience and artistic excess, I find, is key to Burnett’s work. Confronted with the triptych in unity, the churning automatism of industry is nowhere to be found. The artist’s handling of paint is spirited: a far cry from the soulless core of his subjects. His hand-milled paints make use of highly saturated, incandescent pigment, and there’s a material duel between his looser, experimental brushwork for fire and water against more streamlined, geometric forms. Everywhere, you unearth marks that speak to the artist’s hand: of laboured and considered aesthetic choice, as opposed to the singularity of contemporary mechanisation or even Artificial Intelligence. 

The Artist’s Studio with The Last Breath (2024), Oil on Cotton Duck in Water Gilded Artist’s Frame, 271 x 167cm.

In Oil Rig Aflame in the North Sea, a blazing, Venusian figure emerges atop thrashing waves. What could be the aura of divinity instead is instead the radiance of actual fire, whose flame surges through her hair. Of all three paintings, I keep coming back to this one, because it’s this iteration in which Burnett's work reaches its metaphorical zenith, evoking an oil rig solely through strength of persona and essence. The clue to it all is clutched in her hands — a burning coal, peered into as if it were a crystal ball, an object of scrying. There’s no need for prophecy, though, as the elemental storm that rages behind is caused by the very coal she holds onto.  It’s a beautifully dualistic image: one that imbues anthropogenic catastrophe with the heightened sense of Romantic weather, of poetic spirit and moral questioning.

Oil Rig Aflame in the North Atlantic, Oil on Cotton Duck in Water Gilded Artist’s Frame, 271 x 167cm

The allegorical weight of the composition reminds me of the Modernist writer, D.H Lawrence’s passages on mining. He writes of ‘Men but not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon iron, silicon: elementals. They had something of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass.’ Burnett’s figure couldn’t embody this ‘inhuman beauty’ more, both in her literal anthropomorphism and chromatic realisation in feverish, radiating rings of impasto colour. For Lawrence, who penned Lady Chatterley’s Lover nearly a century earlier, it was the deviance of senseless industry and progress, not infidelity, that he regarded as the highest moral transgression: coal, an inanimate object, reified as if it were itself a cardinal sin.

Then and now, the question of the environmental crisis as a crisis of secular Modernity is the subject of debate between ecologists, historians and sociologists. As we leaf through the pages of books on Russian Constructivism, Burnett has certainly thought about the impact of secular ideology, particularly in the work of artists such as Valentina Kulagina. He tells me it’s not just the ‘architectural, solid and sculptural forms’ of Soviet art that formed the basis for his preparatory drawings — but also ‘the reversal of God-like attributes onto science and industry.’ In their unsurpassable optimism for progress, the zeal reserved for religion was replaced by that of technological advancement. 

Drawing upon vast references, from the Romantics such as Blake as well as the Eastern-European Avant-Garde, Burnett’s practice similarly plays upon the religious and secular. In their imposing presentation, whether it’s their hand water-gilded frames, or scale at over 2.5metres each — Burnett strives to ‘enshrine and eulogise the sense of the twenty-first century, to make something that will outlive me. I ask myself after each painting if I’d be happy with it being my last.’ This sense of preservation is two-fold, as the artist suffered a battle with an aggressive form of cancer in 2021 during the coronavirus epidemic, from which he has now recovered. It’s an experience with mortality that would change anyone’s life: but it’s evident that for Burnett, an aesthetically heightened, non-religious sense is a form of veneration, both personally and more broadly. Post-War art is full of flirtations with the transcendent: I think of Bacon, who stated he only chose the Crucifixion as a motif because it was ‘an armature to hang certain sensations’, or Rothko, whose canvases were, until recently, hung in a non-denominational chapel. In times of atrocity and crisis, religiosity is employed as an artistic device to underscore a situation with unparalleled intensity. The artwork can elicit feelings of awe, terror and a sense of our own diminutiveness — symptoms attributed to what theologian Rudolf Otto coined the ‘numinous’: a fundamentally non-rational aspect of religious experience imbued with mysterious presence.

You certainly can contemplate awe alongside terror in Burnett’s survey of contemporary industry. In the triptych’s central painting, Soil and Spade, a tyrannical bull rider charges across a burning landscape, an allegorical image of deforestation. Uncannily prescient, the palm-tree lined street and ominous pink sky evokes Hollywood ablaze, though the work was completed before the wildfires. Here, the aggression of agriculture manifests as pure machismo — the rider holds a spectre, and the whole painting glimmers and sizzles. When it comes to man-made ugliness, Burnett’s representations can be seductive: we’re reeled in by these modes of extraction, just as we are in real life, in the relentless pursuit of profit and greed. 

In the sphere of contemporary art, perhaps we treat beauty with suspicion, even mutually exclusive to conceptual rigour. I ask Burnett what he thinks of this, particularly in relation to his art-historical influences. He notes thoughtfully; ‘It’s cyclical - what’s criticised as not being contemporary enough is sometimes a sign that what’s contemporary is now old hat’. The grandiosity of his visual language feels unapologetic and uncompromised. The tremendous force his figures exert indeed shows human agency run awry in a very real narrative where the seas boil, the land burns and fish perish. But by reappropriating propagandistic imagery, by instilling machines with omnipotence — the artist uncovers and questions the doctrines that underpin our often unwavering beliefs in progress. In the seventies, historian Lynn White attempted to survey the elusive causes of our problem in The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis. In it, he notes how little we know about previous extinctions and the specificity of their human causes. But what we can know is the contemporary nature of our conceptual scheme: the emergence of the Baconian creed, which equates scientific knowledge with technological practice, can ‘scarcely be dated before about 1850.’

In Industry Incarnate, it’s the very essence of this Baconian principle — more than the instruments of industry themselves — that are actually exalted over the earth, just as Burnett’s malign, deific characters dominate over land and sea. In what is currently regarded as our Fourth industrial age, I find the artist’s elevation of non-sentient machinery into near archetypal stylisation surprisingly apt. When debating science and religion, art and philosophy, as we potter around in the studio, I quickly realise that his natural joie de vivre seeps into the work, even when it purports to be lamentation or even eulogy. When faced with a bond to machinery driven by functionalism — Burnett  implores us to consider our relationship to natural order by re-engaging our most historic,  human and aesthetic sensibilities.