Ultros and the Psychedelia of Peter Max
Colors that don’t want to be believable, just unforgettable.
Welcome back to Artcade, the eyes for seeing the world differently. Honestly, you don’t need to swap eyes, you just need to put on someone else’s glasses. There, now that everything is blurry, imagine how many new things you can come up with. The important part is not to try this experiment while driving. And now, put on your reading glasses so you can focus up close, otherwise how are you supposed to understand what’s written in these lines? Enjoy!
Psychedelia has a particular quirk: it looks simple until someone tries to remake it. At first glance it seems like all you need are bright colors, and yet, try it yourself, it never works. Because you have to be shameless, and Peter Max was. He knew how to make all those color decisions so that, instead of painting a senseless mess, his works come out complete, like worlds we probably wouldn’t want to live in, but for a vacation… absolutely.
Take, for example, one of his many reworks of the Mona Lisa:
I dare you to take a masterpiece, throw colors like these on it, and not get buried under insults. Peter Max can pull that off too. Maybe because he’s seen a lot. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, forced into exile in Shanghai, then living in Israel, passing through Paris, and finally landing in the United States, in Brooklyn. And you can feel all that moving around in his paintings, where pop culture coexists with a fascination for calligraphy and colors from Buddhist tradition, and with his being an artist even outside the gallery circuit. Everything in his works seems to move, even when it’s pinned down on canvas.
And I’m saying “outside the gallery circuit” for a reason: Peter Max, with a name that sounds like a Marvel superhero, started out as a graphic designer and had strong ties to advertising. Thanks to his wide-open mindset, his work gets “contaminated” by the kind of visual language we usually associate with posters, playbills, and mass media. And instead of fighting it off, he leans into it. He turns it up. The sort of thing someone might dismiss as “commercial,” said with that little pinch of snobbery.
But that’s exactly why his images land with the clean, blinding authority of a road sign: you can’t not see them.
Take Peter Max’s palette, funnel it into a video game, and you get Ultros. It’s set on a spaceship, though it feels closer to a greenhouse, lush and overgrown. The result is the visual equivalent of chocolate for your retinas, and the black silhouettes around those color explosions only intensify the trance.
I’m convinced the real objective is to get lost and enjoy the colors. That’s what I understood, anyway. Sure, there’s lore: a “sarcophagus,” seeds, giant critters in every room, an unknown language. But my takeaway was simple: keep staring.
The ship is lush, strange, and overflowing, and little by little you realize the map is something you can cultivate. Plant a seed, let time do its thing, and you’ll get something you can actually use. It sounds like a simple idea, and maybe it is, but in a world this alive it heightens that feeling of exposure, like you’re inside something dangerous, something that’s going to contaminate you sooner or later.
The first time I booted up Ultros, I thought it was going to break through the screen. It didn’t, but it definitely punched straight through my brain.
Hadoque (2024) Ultros [Videogame] [Metroidvania] [12 hours] (PlayStation 5) [Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S] Kepler Interactive
Information Desk:
If you’d like to live a psychedelic experience in a park, there’s no need to resort to any special substances. Just go to Keukenhof. A place where tulips take the place of Ultros’s pixels.
On Peter Max’s official site you can buy original, signed prints and lithographs. The prices are… psychedelic.
My last two coins
What if the world really were painted in these colors? How would our lives change? Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe we’d just get used to it. That’s what we do: give me ricotta semifreddo every day for months and, eventually, even ricotta semifreddo turns into background noise.
But in a world like that, think about the shock of beige. Dark brown. Military green. Those would land like jump scares. And yes, we’re also like that: once you’ve had too much of a good thing, even something that tastes like it came out of a gutter starts sounding weirdly appealing. Or maybe it doesn’t. I need to think about it. Until the next episode, ciao!