A large painting by Max Boyla. Dark purple background with a light bleached white and pink spot on the bottom of the canvas and lighter peach coloured markings on the top.

Greatest magic trick

Large diptych painting by Max Boyla. Dark purple horizontal line markings on a lighter purple background.

The secret truth of the universe

Medium sized painting by Max Boyla. Pink background with two bleached white and pale pink circles in the middle of the canvas, and grey marble markings. 

Medium sized painting by Max Boyla. Salmon coloured marble effect created by dye and ink on satin. To the left of the canvas large bleached segment.

Ignite

A large diptych painting by Max Boyla. Circular white forms on a pink background.

Sun spot

Neon light installation by Max Boyla. White, star shaped neon light suspended on a metal rod from the ceiling.

Guiding Star

A large painting by Max Boyla. Dark purple background with a light bleached white and pink spot on the top of the canvas and lighter peach coloured markings on the bottom.

Ever under the sun

Medium sized painting by Max Boyla. Salmon pink background with marbled markings on the left and right hand side of the canvas divided by a light pink bleached line.

Lightwave

Large landscape painting by Max Boyla. A dark purple background with bleached light pink and white markings, making a line through the centre of the canvas.

Quicker than the day

Medium-sized painting by Max Boyla. Light pink and grey tones across a satin canvas with a bleached white symmetrical pattern on the side.

Ember

Small painting by Max Boyla. Pink background with bleached white and light pink circular markings all over the canvas and grey marbled lines on the top part.

Span

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.

Detail of an abstract Max Boyla painting on silk with large white spots against a red and pink ground

Installation images of Max Boyla's exhibition 'Crying like a fire in the sun' at Workplace, London. 

Max Boyla

Crying like a fire in the sun

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Max Boyla