Maximilian Toth Encourages Bad Behavior

Little Beasts, Maximilian Toth's second solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser, is filled with large figurative paintings and drawings of teenagers causing trouble. Rendered in comic-book detail, these tender depictions of suburban antics—jumping chain-link fences, trashing swimming pools, and playground games turned to pushing matches—trade in a coming-of-age currency familiar to fans of Rob Reiner's Stand by Me or Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. But where those films chart a discreet course for their protagonists, Toth's canvases leave their subjects floating in the slack tide of the viewer's projections. The questions how, what, and when are clearly unanswered despite Toth's detailed scenes, which sit like chalk on a blackboard. Still one can't help but assume that something certain is just off the painting's edge, past all the action, right at the tip of the tongue.
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