Crying like a fire in the sun

Workplace is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by London-based artist Max Boyla.

Across Workplace’s two floors, Boyla stages a new series of paintings and installations which explore the spiritual and cultural resonances of the sun. Set to open on 29 February, a leap day, the title of the exhibition evokes the sun as a beacon of hope and a source of anxiety, just as many religious traditions rely upon heat and light as powerful metaphors, a symbolism which becomes all the more pertinent as contemporary environmental consciousness addresses the climate crisis.

On the ground floor, Workplace’s prominent street-facing window fills the space with light, yet absent of other sources, the brightness is dependent on the time of day and weather. As visitors walk through the space, a single light bulb is attached to the entrance doorway, making visitors more aware of their own presence alongside the works, and creates a sensory relationship between the objects and how they are encountered. Celestial and ghost-like, these images call back to Boyla’s long-standing interest in spiritual notions of existence and mythological entities, yet no tangible figures are depicted. Instead, the abstract paintings embrace elemental qualities, such as one featuring the bluish-black of the moon and another with prominent white spots against a reddish background, mimicking the afterimage of looking at a bright light, an optical reference which expands upon the artist’s interest in the relationship between looking and knowing, what can be seen and what evades our senses.

Similar motifs repeat and shift across the levels, creating a sense of transition as if one was a dark inversion of the other, akin to the rotation of the sun and moon. As visitors make their way downstairs, dim lighting in the basement contrasts the daylight above, while a hanging neon sculpture of a star hangs over the staircase marking the transition between both. The series of paintings continue into the basement and are scored with a cyclical soundtrack appropriated from Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi film Sunshine, where scientists attempt to reignite the sun as it dies. Here, Boyla is playing with notions of perception alongside a carefully considered atmosphere.

The ways in which the paintings function like an installation within the gallery echoes the process behind their construction. In many of the works, Boyla forgoes a traditional use of brushes on a flat stretched surface, instead folding, wrapping and rolling the material, which is then seeped and stained with different combinations of pigment, water, ink and noxious industrial liquids such as bleach, creating a kind of alchemy that emerges out of a physical, almost sculptural process. Painted on satin, a fabric that is notably glossy, smooth and lustrous, the shiny surface absorbs paint and reflects light, becoming sensitive to the conditions in which they are encountered, a physical quality to the surface that manifests like an illusion.

Driven by an interest in music and film, the artist’s approach to painting follows a subtle thread of analogue influences. Boyla has referenced the glossy surface of the satin he paints on, like a blank CD or DVD, with his painting process riffing on the idea of ‘burning’ a duplicate on a disc. The artist is interested in the ways repetition and multiplicity are connected with analogue material culture, yet also allude to spiritual notions of infinity and the cosmos.