Maxwell's series of twelve paintings, titled "Perfect Circle Series," represents a striking change of direction in his work. From big paintings created on the floor, often with a squeegy,
with as many as 200 layers of paint and glazing, he has moved to small scaled works on a vertical easel, gaining a new closeness to the process of painting from the use of the brush. Each painting generates a dialogue between an initial freer, more open, romantic field and a more classical choice making, the formal element. A voracious reader Maxwell has been influenced by Nietzche, especially by his opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, of the controlled and the free. With this series, Maxwell pays very direct homage to the great nineteenth century German philosophers and poets who have influenced him, dreamers of the absolute. So, he paints absent absolutes. The circle represents the idea of the absolute, but it is an elusive circle: the passionate desire for perfection or completion leads not to completion, but to the passion of dialogue, the process of painting. Into this dialogue enter smaller dark objects, triangles, circles, elipses, like dancers in the foreground of some mysterious stage. With his mantelled frames Maxwell extends his dialogue to the viewer. Close to our everyday reality, these mantels tempt us to place on them our own "bric-a-brac or car keys." Maxwell concludes his heavy duty roster of Hegel, Schiller, Schelling, Heidegger, Goethe, Kant, etc. with an homage to Elvis Presley; only here, a star floods and bursts the bounds of the circle. Maxwell states: "I am interested in moments of slippage, where all is possible and nothing makes sense."

Elizabeth L. Langhorne, Art Historian