Intake of Breath: Massillon Museum’s 2022 CAN Triennial Winner, Maxmillian Peralta

When the room has emptied, when the breath lets go, when the wire pulls taut, when the light keeps shining: places without people still tell stories we can hear. Maxmillian Peralta reveals his new work—a significant departure from his earlier, court-painting-inspired portraiture—in Flat Affect, on view at the Massillon Museum’s Studio M Gallery, June 21 through August 3.

Peralta received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2021 and garnered the Agnes Gund President’s Traveling Scholarship that same year. In 2022, he was chosen by Massillon as their CAN Triennial Exhibition Prize winner, and received a portrait commission from LeBron James for the cover of the inaugural issue of SpringHill Company’s publication, Program. His work has been exhibited at the Pratt Institute in New York, the Rhodes Tower in Columbus, and as part of the Love is Resistance exhibition at Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station in 2025. Peralta is also one of the founders of and program director at feverdream, a nonprofit organization that provides artists with resources to cultivate and advance the arts.

Up until now, Peralta’s work has been an exploration of portraiture’s exclusionary history and a commentary on class and subculture. Large paintings, often inspired by the works of Franz Hals and Diego Velázquez, featured figures wearing designer fashion (Supreme, Balenciaga, Prada), as well as a series of “sneakerhead” paintings—court-style portraits in which the person’s head was replaced by a recognizable designer sneaker.

“Work that I did for my BFA felt much more safe, almost art in self-defense, that prevented me from having to look inward,” says Peralta. “Right after I finished my BFA, SpringHill reached out with the commission for LeBron. It was a really exciting project—I didn’t paint anything else during that time, took a long time, and looked through the lens of court paintings—and when it was done, I thought, ‘I’ve painted the king,’ and this is the end of a series.”

Peralta said a thematic goodbye to portraiture in 2023 with Untitled, a large portrait in which a figure whose head is wrapped in chain mail is turned away from the viewer. Now, Flat Affect presents Peralta’s naturalism—which often approaches tromp l’oeil in a muted color palette of acrylic paint and ink on canvas. He added airbrushing as a painting technique over the past year, making the light bleed in several new works incredibly luminous.

Peralta’s new work of Flat Affect investigates what he calls “unactivated spaces,” which include tense interiors without people as well as confusing, fantastical exteriors. Hyperrealism often tips into surrealism, and tranquil places vibrate with tension. “It’s as if there are violins humming inside and horns blaring outside,” says Peralta.

In Ohio Quarter Horse, a massive horse made from glowing iron rears against a background of power lines and highway bridges; another painting details delicate cadaver eye caps floating outside, perhaps a commentary on willfully closing one’s eyes to what is happening. Representations of power—from empty electrical outlets in his interior paintings to a cacophony of electrical line pollution in Crowded Skies—appear throughout Peralta’s work, suggesting an ominous ubiquity of something greater and more menacing than oneself.

Peralta’s interiors pulse with comforting uncertainty. In Air Mattress, a newly constructed loft has a splendid view of urban dreck (rendered as a pastel landscape—such a different kind of million-dollar view) through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but the only thing inside the space is a deflated air mattress.

“His current body of work has less to do with outright portraiture; it seems to have evolved to depict an interior emotional state or identity,” says Emily Vigil, Studio M coordinator and Fred F. Silk Community Room Gallery coordinator at the Massillon Museum. “Peralta’s technical ability to describe these objects and their atmosphere continues to be impressive, and we were excited to feature an emerging artist at the beginning of his career.” She notes that while Peralta’s new work is more personal, it is also more representative of his generation.

The pandemic—even now, at the five-year mark from its start—and political climate have intensified pressures on everyone, but the impact on people in their twenties can be seen clearly in Peralta’s work. Here there is a constant thrum of uncertainty about one’s personal space as a seemingly eternal renter, forever at the whim and scrutiny and limit of landlords—Peralta talks about not being able to lock his bedroom door in one apartment because the landlord had painted over the locks.

3 Bedroom Duplex is heavy with emptiness: a corner again, a blast of light tempered by the weight of a sullen floor and walls painted the same color, a static ceiling fan, and two outlets in waiting. Peralta’s interiors record the moment just before or just after something important happens, and their sense of breathlessness is uncomfortable but familiar.

Peralta posts work on his Instagram; comments on Duplex included snarky remarks about landlords, and followers mistaking the painting for a real estate listing. A flurry of commentary accompanied Air Mattress, lauding Peralta’s hyperreal painting technique; deconstructing the types of power lines outside; and noting the disconnect between progress, struggle, gentrification, and affordability.

“I am so happy with what I’m doing after making this big shift,” says Peralta. “Painting spaces has been super freeing. It’s not about capturing a likeness but more about creating the atmosphere in painstaking detail. I’m not interested in lateral movement, making something just like the last one. I want projects of a different flavor.”

Flat Affect’s opening reception is 5 to 7 pm on Saturday, June 21. The Massillon Museum is located at 121 Lincoln Way, Massillon, Ohio, 44646, and is open 9:30 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Saturday and 2 to 5 pm Sunday. Admission is free. Visit massillonmuseum.org for more information.