“It’s Like Doing a Puzzle”: Max Copolov Recreates Family Photographs From Slivers of Wood

“Every time I’d visit galleries overseas, I was completely captivated by marquetry,” Max Copolov says. “But it was always fruit and flowers – very traditional motifs.”

A visit to Paris’s Petit Palais in 2022 shifted the Melbourne-based interior designer and furniture maker’s focus to the 17th- and 18th-century decorative woodworking technique.

Curiosity quickly turned into practice. A Google search led him to Atelier Lacroix Marrec, a 400-year-old Paris workshop, where he took a three-week crash course in advanced marquetry.

“They taught me the traditional process of laying a flower onto a blank sheet of rosewood,” he says. “When I came back to Melbourne I didn’t touch it for a while, but when I quit my job, I gave it a crack and it just escalated from there.”

From the outset, Copolov resisted the idea of traditional reproduction. The goal was to reimagine marquetry – the art of finely cut wood veneers assembled into intricate compositions – in a fresh way.

“I knew from the beginning that in order to make the ancient technique feel vital, it had to be displayed in a different context – something that felt inherently now.”

The resulting works draw on archival images, re-creating intimate scenes of everyday life as delicate timber compositions inlaid in slick cabinetry and other furniture.

Some pieces, shown as part of his solo exhibition Interwar Vienna, re-create family photographs taken by Copolov’s great-grandfather Richard Tandler, an avant-garde photographer whose work is held in archives of the NGV and Melbourne University. The images were taken in Vienna between 1922 and 1936.

A white oak credenza depicts a train station in Vienna. A pair of solid American oak bedside tables portrays three women talking in a public library. A tall cabinet shows Copolov’s grandmother and her twin sister sitting on their parents’ laps in their Vienna living room in 1936, while another painstakingly re-creates an extended family portrait across two cabinet doors.

The work is quietly conversational, telling stories of migration, displacement and how memory shifts across generations.

“What’s so beautiful about marquetry is that you’re creating depth and illusion entirely through smoke and mirrors,” he says. “It’s literally just different shades of wood. No dye, nothing.”

The process is methodical and physically intense.

“I sit there with a glass of wine at night,” Copolov says. “I bring all the pieces home carefully in a box and assemble them at the dining table, slowly watching the image come together. It’s like doing a puzzle.”

Each piece takes weeks, sometimes months, to complete depending on its complexity. Some works, including Int.Cab.02, require between 60 and 80 hours to complete the marquetry alone, excluding the time spent designing and fabricating the furniture.

For Copolov, marquetry offers a slower, more deliberate counterpoint to contemporary modes of production. “We’re entering a new tech-driven world and, in a way, the work is in revolt against that,” he says. “We are going back to a tactile form of expression.”

That tension, between old and new, ornament and restraint, nostalgia and reinvention, sits at the centre of his practice. It’s something that carries through Copolov’s interior design projects, where he renovates heritage Victorian and art deco homes. His lighting pieces similarly reinterpret vintage silhouettes as industrial flatpack metal forms.

“My design philosophy across furniture, interiors and marquetry is referential,” he says. “It looks back to obscure moments in design history and brings them forward through a contemporary lens.”

Copolov’s work is available to view and purchase at C Gallery in South Yarra, Melbourne.

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