2024
When I was curating images for my book The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook Of All That Is Unreal, I found myself drawn to the peculiar charm of Max Frey’s undersea tableau not because it featured an obviously fantastical creature like a dragon or unicorn, but because it captured something equally magical: the strange poetry of a human figure astride a sea slug, as casual as if riding a horse through city streets.
Frey’s fascination with undersea subjects emerged during a time when the natural world was capturing the imagination of both scientists and artists alike. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw an explosion of interest in marine biology, with publications like Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature” bringing the strange beauty of sea creatures to the public eye. This was an era when the depths of the ocean still held countless mysteries, and every new scientific expedition might reveal creatures that seemed as fantastical as any medieval bestiary.
Frey wasn’t alone in finding artistic potential in marine life. Odilon Redon transformed deep-sea creatures into mystical floating eyes and otherworldly blossoms. Jean Painlevé’s early underwater photography and films of seahorses and octopi revealed an underwater ballet so strange it influenced the Surrealists.
What sets Frey’s approach apart is how he places humans in direct interaction with these creatures. His figure atop the sea slug brings to mind the way Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin placed classical figures among realistic Mediterranean landscapes. But where Böcklin’s work often leans into myth and melancholy, Frey’s sea slug rider maintains a wonderfully deadpan quality. The subject’s imperious expression suggests they see nothing unusual about their choice of vehicle – it’s everyone else who’s being peculiar about it.
This wasn’t a one-off flight of fancy for Frey. His work reveals a whole series of these marine mounts, each more fantastic than the last. Some glide through the water with sleek, silvery bodies that wouldn’t look out of place on a pulp magazine cover. Others sport mohawk-like manes or crown-like fins atop their heads. Yet their riders maintain that same air of perfect nonchalance, as if commuting to some underwater office on their sea-slug steeds.
In ‘”Das Prinzesslein” (The Little Princess), Frey gives us a humanless scene – though perhaps not entirely. The central creature’s expression suggests a strange mix of concern, bewilderment, and haughty bearing as she surveys her underwater domain of muddy anemones and eels. A gross, leering, crab-like beast lurks nearby, barnacles and tentacles sprouting from it like some strange mutation. One can’t help but suspect we’re witnessing the aftermath of a curse, the little princess transformed but still maintaining her royal demeanor among these unsettling depths.
In “Das Wunder” (The Wonder), Frey takes us deeper still, into a dim underwater grotto where a serpentine creature – or possibly two creatures, it’s difficult to tell if we’re seeing a two-headed being or a pair – gawps at what appears to be a human figure encased in a glowing egg. The murky illumination from this strange cocoon creates the kind of scene you might expect in a deep-sea expedition’s fever dream.
Finally emerging onto land, we find “Tier und Mensch” (Animal and Human), where a hybrid of giraffe, llama, and dinosaur appears with pinky-beige hide and doleful expression, its wiggly ears and sad face giving it an almost apologetic air. A figure kneels beside this bizarre beast in an enigmatic tableau that raises more questions than it answers. Like his undersea riders, Frey presents this unlikely encounter as if it were the most natural thing in the world, leaving us to puzzle over whether it’s the scene that’s strange, or merely our perception of it.
While New Objectivity and Symbolism appear frequently in descriptions of Frey’s work, these pieces suggest an artist operating in a territory entirely his own, where grand sea wyrms serve as commuter transport and sad-eyed hybrid beasts receive mysterious visitors. Each piece is presented with the calm assurance of someone who has witnessed something deeply weird and is simply waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
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