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love". Restany also underlines the considerable actuality of Hamlet's actuality of Hamlet's discussion: "Hamlet's fantastic is a language of our surreal modernity" and specifies how "his critical narration is without appeal, his eroticism is of the first degree. His perfected and very capable technique emphasizes the expressive power of the strident acrylic colours". What most interests me in Max Hamlet's work is that he does not busy himself within the snug wakes of fashion: he has avoided both the easy formalisms of the cartoonist and the pseudo-commitment of the neo-expressionists in whose retrieved indignation there is no longer trace of the tragic, scourging and corrosive charge of their model. Likewise, he has known how to avoid the pettily political dimension of a social painting. As Vittorini put it, Hamlet never dreams of "playing the fife for the revolution", the desire for freedom of language has overpowered whatever attempt at political closure. At the same time he neither avoids reality nor screens it behind a false hermeticism. When his painting rises to the quality of the myth then this is the lancinating product of reality experienced in its beauty and its aspects of ugliness. While not moving away from the concreteness of situations and events, his research work creatively reflects our world and its dramatic, ferocious sortileges.
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The characteristics of Max Hamlet's multiform work are equally to be found in the two-dimensional plastic operation - painting, drawing and etchings - as in his photographic work, the latter always supported "by a singular touch which rectifies atmospheres saturated by a stupefied, innocent, malicious and - at the same time - also lucid magic", in such a way as to give us "photographic images of dense splendour, of languid and caressing sensuality" (as appropriately pointed out by Giuseppe Turroni). Perhaps it is with his polycrome sculpture - the fascinanting evocation of mythical figures - that Max Hamlet demonstrates greater innovative force. Often it is a three-dimensional transposition of themes encounteder in his paintings. However, in these solid versions they take on a probably greater dynamic density than that marking his two-dimensional work. The composite development of his modelling, far from the vulgar and grandiloquent porn of Jeff Loons, allows Max Hamlet to recreate an oneiric atmosphere which is often charged with erotic valences, never lacking in an aulic quality that at times verges on an hieratic sacredness. The lesson which Hamlet reminds us of with this new chapter of his inventiveness is that already given to us by other great artists, in the past (such as by Leonardo) and in the present (I am thinking of continue
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