Close Looking No. 6: Maxxing

Christina Habibi

Maxxing, 2026
24 × 30 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and graphite on canvas

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I've long been interested in the point where pleasure and unease begin to resemble each other. Something can be funny and threatening, seductive and disturbing, absurd and completely serious at the same time.

In Maxxing, bright color competes with heavy black, dripping paint, graphite lines, and fragments that seem to perform for our attention. There's energy and humor in the painting, but there's also something slightly menacing beneath it. I don't want one reading to defeat the other.

That contradiction feels increasingly familiar. We live with a constant mixture of spectacle, humor, fear, outrage, and entertainment, often delivered through the same screen. Disturbing events become content. Seriousness becomes performance. Humor becomes a way of absorbing things that might otherwise be unbearable. It can become difficult to know where amusement ends and discomfort begins.

Maxxing occupies that unstable territory for me. Its brightness doesn't eliminate its darkness, and its darker places don't extinguish its pleasure. Both remain present, asking us to stay with a contradiction that contemporary life increasingly asks us to navigate.

The painting does not ask us to choose between pleasure and unease, but to consider how easily one can become the other.