Join us this Friday, March 21st, the first day of spring, for the release of Max Capus’ new publication Cats and Dogs, 7-10Pm!

40 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9850425-7-3
Cover image: ‘Happy Halloween’(2024), inkjet and pastel
Copyright © 2025, Max Capus.
Published by Grunts Rare Books
First edition of 75 copies

Introduction: Greyhounds of Equal Swiftness

"Max and I work at a bar with lots of people inside. We only take cash, and the most popular thing to order is beer. The bar sits in a quiet neighborhood on the corner of two streets lined by many houses with many people inside those too. People go home at a reasonable hour, and the block is dark and quiet in all directions. Cats dart across the width of the alley. Sleepy neighbors’ dogs relieve themselves in the snow.

Max sees on his walks the remnants of the seasons as they are lived by many. In the space above flowerbeds, rainbow pinwheels and bright colored whirligigs stir wind across dead grass. The trees are tall and auspicious, and Halloween decorations populate yards well into spring. In winter, weather soaks the neighborhood, and posters searching for lost cats and dogs, damaged from the summer’s sun, slowly peel from their street
poles and into the landscape. Max collects these images as he moves through them, taking photos with his iPhone and saving what is disappearing to disappear it again.

At home, Max prints duplicates on paper using dried-out ink cartridges and draws back into them with pastel. In Polya (2024)—a blown-out flyer for a lost cat of the same name—Max completes some of the space around the word “MISSING” with orange marks but leaves the letters otherwise empty. Elsewhere, he fills the rectangle indicated by Polya’s “REWARD” sticker with dashes of purple and redrafts a houseplant in the frame around her.

To further complicate the visual surface, Max digitally overlays scenes from other walks in different seasons. In Polya (2024), for example, he layers an image of an iron gate over the entire composition, allowing the gate’s design to replace details lost to weather or printing; the wrought iron scrolls meet the cat’s eyes, and the gate’s
rails imitate legs and whiskers. By marking out original impressions digitally and in pastel, Max brings the final suite of images closer to his walking observations.

The works contained within the pages of Cats and Dogs are not reproductions of paintings or documentation of works in space in the traditional sense. Cats and Dogs is an artist book: a collection of twenty-eight visual combinations—printed, embellished, scanned, manipulated—printed here exclusively for the first time.

Cats and Dogs is, in this way, a container for Max’s visual process and a continuation of his investigative approach to painting, a subject that is largely photographic, materially driven, and transient. While paintings are often encountered by photograph, the works in Cats and Dogs live only within these pages. The process of distilling an image over and over does not mediate a separate original but instead makes the act of looking inseparable from the form in which it appears."

Taylor Payton

Preorders are now live HERE with the option for pickup at the release!