I first saw Max Boyla’s work last year at Workplace Gallery in London. I walked through the door and immediately noticed music playing. It was sort of drony and warped. I asked the girl behind the desk what it was and she said it was the score from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a sci-fi movie from 2009 about ​​a group of astronauts sent on a mission to reignite our dying sun.

That gorgeously atmospheric music perfectly set the tone for Max’s otherworldly paintings, with their vast expanses of space, melting colour shifts, and almost iridescent surfaces. His work didn’t look like traditional oil or acrylic on canvas to me, so I glanced at a handout, curious to learn what I was looking at. Dye, ink and bleach on satin was the short answer. This unique concoction seemed fitting, given the work’s feeling of a science lab experiment, with trippy chemical reactions creating something beautifully ambiguous and shimmering.

A few months after that show, I was on a trip to Palma, Mallorca, where I managed to catch Max’s work at Tube Gallery. His pieces once again ignited my curiosity about his highly original studio practice. Part of me wanted to discover the magic trick behind it all, so I messaged Max, a Scottish artist based in London, and here we are.

Hey Max. When I saw your show at Workplace I remember there was music playing in the gallery - the score from Sunshine, I think. It really set the tone for the work and its otherworldliness. What was your intention there?

For the show I used natural light, so that the conditions of the space/work would change and shift throughout the day, creating a direct dialogue with the paintings and the movement of the sun. I cropped part of the soundtrack from the film Sunshine and slowed it down to about a third of its original speed to gradually reach a crescendo within the score and then fizzle out.

I was initially thinking about how to get daylight into the lower floor of the gallery, and so in a convoluted way, I managed this by introducing the sound element of sunshine. I had it play cyclically from within the staff kitchen as a way of suggesting something that exists somewhat beyond the parameters of the show. The paintings sort of function in this way as well, they’re crops, extractions of something that I’m trying to tune into.

Do you think sci-fi - or even our place in the universe - is a theme in your work? I’m guessing there’s a deeper interest there for you.

I think about Andre Tarkovsky’s films quite a lot - Stalker and Solaris had a big impact on me when I first saw them. Science fiction is quite useful in offering obscurity and allows for certain ideas or possibilities to manifest, exist and breathe long enough to offer a parallel or reflective view on things. The surrealists operated in this kind of paradoxical logic as well, which plays a big influence on my approach. There’s always a sense of truth in those gaps of logic that I’m interested in.

I’d say generally my practice is a cosmological yearning towards ideas of the infinite. Whether there’s an edge to existence, or an eternal recurrence is something that I integrate into my work. Ever expansive or confined, swirling and stuck on loop.

We also caught your show at Tube Gallery in Palma. Again, the works had such a strong presence as you enter the gallery. Is atmosphere, or creating a very specific mood, a big part of the end goal when working on these pieces?

Yes, I very much see the way that the paintings function within the space as an integral condition of the work. When I first started developing my practice during my BA at Gray’s School of Art, I studied painting but was making these large sculptural installations, which is something that has always stuck with me. I’ve gone full circle and see the paintings as installations in a way. They harbour an environment, within and around themselves.

The works often have a dialogue with one another in evoking particular themes and I aim to create this kind of balance, as if staging a scene or some obscurely written piece of music. The paintings are very reactive things; the satin material absorbs and reflects light in such a way that demands a position in the environment, which then becomes a composition in itself. I see painting as expansive in this sense. I guess I’m interested in composing something that you feel and experience, as opposed to something that you can only look at two dimensionally. A sense of enveloping.

Tell me about your process. I think I remember something like bleach on satin in some pieces? What are your tricks?

Wouldn’t you like to know! But yes, I use lots of somewhat domestic applications of dyes, bleaches, as well as various mixes of different paint. It feels quite alchemical at times, or a bit like cooking; a pinch of this, a blob of that. I work in this kind of mad-wet-rush at times, where lots of moves and decisions are made intuitively, though after long spells of contemplation, but quickly before things set or dry. Every work is a kind of experiment. I’m always trying something new in an attempt to discover the unexpected. I’m like a really shit scientist or something.

I love the scale of your work. Are you generally happier when working big?

I think it's important that the work can feel like an encounter, something that has a physical presence. I’m interested in how the paintings are experienced as you move around them, how the conditions of their setting and your physicality interacts with them. More recently I’ve been thinking of them like a vinyl record, when they’re hung and in the light, they’re sort of on and playing, but that everyone hears something different.

Does that size ever cause difficulties when it comes to your studio space, storing and shipping, etc.?

I’m quite editorial, so I’ll make a lot of work on loose satin but only stretch the ones that work or that I’m intrigued by. Things often get re-dyed, bleached or fragmented down before knowing if they’ll ever make it out of the studio. With the show in Palma, I flew over with a duffel bag of rolled satin pouches and stretched the paintings there to figure out what would work in the space. I was obviously stopped in the airport.

Finally, I like to ask artists if they think their work reflects their personality in any way. What do you think your work might say about you?

I dread to wonder…

Follow Max on Instagram: @actually_maxboyla

Things on Our Radar This Week

• We’re hyped to finally see a Joe Bradley solo show in London, just announced for David Zwirner next month!

• We’re late to this but Katy Hessel had Rose Wylie on her pod to tie in with Rose’s recent solo show

The Best Painting Shows in London This Month

• David Hockney’s underrated student paintings at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert (ends 18 July)

• ‘Handful of Dust’ group show at Palmer Gallery (ends 14 June)

• The ‘Elective Affinities’ group show at Vardaxoglou Gallery (opens 31 May)

Thanks for reading, see you next time!
Oliver & Kezia xx

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