When Love is a Bird, Not a Cage

Max was many things at once and, as he wished, he could be a painter, botanist, actor, philosopher, novelist, bird, fish... Perhaps because, in essence, he was what people call "a dreamer."

An untiring explorer, Max loved to climb all the possibilities of thought and shape them through an inexhaustible diversity of colors, textures, forms, materials, and figures that he combined, intertwining them with his fierce curiosity about the world.

Max disobeyed his mother, time, and the wind.

He defied reason and preferred warm chills, sharp fields, square circles, neatly combed roots.

He also delighted in spying on the most intimate and hidden corners of things, expanding their details and setting them free.

He surrounded himself with flowers, papers and books, cardboard, maps and silk fabrics, pencils and brushes, postcards, photos, engravings—in short, anything with which he could create magic by combining images and words.

With each book, he discovered maddened moons, impossible territories, a vast and profound world, both underwater and alpine...

full of possibilities.

One day, he met Leonora, who dreamed of transforming into a horse,

and he understood that he had always wanted to be a bird.

And so, Max and Leonora fell in love, wed with the wind, and lived at the epicenter of a strange dream, in a fevered, symbolic, and dreamlike era.

But dreams last only as long as a yawn, and Max realized that not even the strongest glue in the world could allow them to prolong theirs.

And as he spent hours, mute as a fish, watching the drawings in the sky, the flocks of birds in flight, he learned to paint portraits…

to paint flowers…

to fly without wings with his feet planted on the ground and to draw as the branches do when shaken by the wind.

That was Max, the bird-man, and what we tell here is only a small part of his extraordinary story.