This month, LVH Art spoke with Max Boyla, a Scottish-Turkish artist based in London, to learn about his affinity to using satin, his experimental approach, and the inspirations that drive his work. Boyla's work is currently featured in Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset exhibition, An Uncommon Thread, running until April 21, 2025. He also has a work in New Contemporaries at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), which closes on March 23, 2025. He is part of a group exhibition opening at Sim Smith on March 20th, running until April 19th, 2025. LVH Art also showcased Max's work There is no key, you have to sing in our last exhibition, "Double Take," which ran from May 30 to July 22, 2024.
Boyla’s creative process is highly physical, often involving twisting and wrapping fabric on the floor. He speaks of his practice as if he’s engaging with living, breathing matter. While each of his works is unique, they share common themes: the exploration of illusion, the fleeting nature of existence, and the complexities of consumerism. His canvas’ conjure abstract cosmologies—surreal landscapes that seem to shift before the viewer's eyes, transforming with changing light or as one moves around them.
LVH Art: What attracts you to working with satin?
Max Boyla: I guess I'm a bit of a magpie, I like to collect things that I’m drawn to. I was in my second year of studying at the RA, and was playing around with different materials that I had accumulated. Exploring synthetics at the time, I came across this satin; then, all of a sudden, it became a core element of my practice. The unique quality of the material highlighted certain conceptual aspects that I was thinking about. I love the lustrous sheen of this particular satin. I think in part, it has to do with wanting to achieve a physical interaction with the person viewing it, in that I wanted the work's presence to shift, as one moves around and the light changes; to make something that you can’t really capture in a photograph, that comes alive when you stand in front of it.
I also often think of satin as a ready-made, with its own history; a mass-produced synthetic material made of petroleum that's closely tied to consumerism. Something about the satin just has a touch of kitsch to it in the best way that other materials don’t possess.
LVH Art: How important is experimentation to your practice? Just looking around the studio I can see lots of buckets of ink and chemical mixtures.
Max Boyla: I'm always trying something new or trying to figure something out. I feel that experimentation is really at the core of my practice. In terms of all the buckets, this is tied to a kind of alchemy in a way. I see my work as this sort of semi-self-aware spiritual endeavour. This idea to will something into existence through these kinds of mixtures, feels slightly spiritual and alchemical to me at times.
LVH Art: I’ve read that you’ve referred to your paintings as an illusion—could you elaborate on this?
Max Boyla: I guess what I mean with illusion is that I’m very removed from the paintings in a way. My works are mostly all folded, twisted, soaked and sprayed. They go through all these various very physical hands-on processes, yet there's no gesture of the hand in it. Instead of painting on a surface, the surface is moving around the paint.
My work also revolves around exploring different dimensions. Much like how the Cubists tried to capture the fourth dimension to explore time and space, I aim to subtly convey these different dimensional qualities in my works. When I shape and mold the forms, I’m working in the third-dimension, as it’s very physical and on the floor and it takes up a physical space. Then once it’s dried and stretched it becomes flat and technically two-dimensional. So you see this three-dimensional reality in a two-dimensional way, hypothetically giving you a fourth-dimensional vantage point. So when a viewer is present and moves around it, the work transforms and activates in relation to their movement. I’m exploring how things change and evolve over time, so the concept of perception and illusion plays a central role in my work in that way.
LVH Art: Could you walk us through your process? Do you begin with a plan, or is it more spontaneous?
Max Boyla: In my studio, there's a large sheet of canvas spread out on the floor, which serves as my painting environment or "zone." I usually work directly on the floor, and sometimes hang the fabric in various positions. Afterwards I might crop it and stretch it over a canvas or on the wall to see how it’s developing. Sometimes I work with a loose plan, but some of the best works I have made are the ones that I'm very surprised by – the ones that emerge. If I know what a painting will look like before I make it, then it can feel like it has this dead quality to it that I’m not as interested in. I also try never to repeat works directly. Repetition and duplicity already have an important role to play.
LVH ART: How long does it usually take you to create your works?
Max Boyla: It’s hard to say as every work is different. I kind of work in these bursts of energy and liveliness. I often question my work for a long time, like is this the direction I want to take it in, or is this the right palette or size.. I sometimes take one thing, such as a colour or size and use that as a springboard to action. Then the actual making is often quite quick and can be somewhat chaotic, even though it feels direct and specific at the same time. For example, sometimes I will be in the studio most of the day thinking through work, and then I will realise that I need to get a certain train and leave in 20 minutes. I then get this pressurized moment and burst of energy where I have to make decisive actions and trust my intuition. Then the next day I will unfold what I have done, and sometimes if it’s still wet I will alter its course if I can see a work is not doing something well or becoming too obvious in a way.
LVH Art: It sounds like you're working with another living entity in a way.
Max Boyla: For sure, when I work the satin feels like it’s very much alive. Sometimes when a piece simply doesn’t work I'll redye it, scrub it, crop parts of it, or have to just entirely give up on it, for a while at least. Sometimes it’s these works that I am wrestling with for a while that turn into quite interesting things. In my studio I have a whole pile of satin works that I have put to the side that are “in the balance.”
LVH Art: Is there a specific reason why you gravitate towards a larger scale in your practice?
Max Boyla: I do make smaller works, but right now making larger works interests me more because they feel more all-enveloping. They are able to achieve this idea of presence, when a person stands and moves in front of the work. In a way I feel like my works are as close to installation as they are to painting, because they're so reactive to an environment, while also having the ability to produce or emanate one. They feel like they can exist in different conditions than a normal painting. I also quite like the idea of paintings in the way that they're only alive when you're there, and right now I am able to achieve that better through a larger scale.
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LVH Art: How do you go about titling your works?
Max Boyla: Quite a lot of my titles come from songs actually, lyrics or titles. Or sometimes someone will just say something and it is kind of strangely poetic, so I'll write it down and then recall it as a title later. For example the work that was in the LVH show, There is no key, you have to sing, was from a random moment. It came from when I was visiting my partner's grandmother and went to use the bathroom, and when I was in there she shouted through “there is no key, you have to sing,” as in sing so no one comes in accidentally because there isn’t a lock. I wrote it down somewhere just because I thought it was interesting on its own. Then also, with that work the pattern turned out slightly similar to the crochet blankets my partner’s grandmother crochets, so there was also that connection to her, so it felt even more “right” to title the work that way. Sometimes these things feel like they’re aligning and falling together in a very serendipitous way.
LVH Art: Does the work Fire of Love have to do with the documentary by any chance?
Max Boyla: Yes, it ties into the film. It was such a good film about love, as well as volcanoes, destructive forces, fire and light, and some of those themes are really relevant to my work. When I watched that film I was starting to see my current partner, which I think in hindsight also contributed to the work. I also remember seeing a Patrick Heron exhibition and thinking I was really seeing colour for the first time in a way. I really wanted to capture a sense of vibrancy within that painting, so I used more red and orange tones, which is more of my partner's favourite palette. At the time I was mainly using lilac, so having the red tones really contrasted and broke, and expanded what I was doing in a way. But I could not have told you any of this while I was making the work. It was just instinctual at the time, and now looking back I can tell you all of this in hindsight.
LVH Art: Some of your works have this feeling of close-up shots, almost as if you're observing something under a microscope, particularly A Chance to Bond, 2024 that is currently being shown at Hauser and Wirth Sommerset. Yet, they also have an expansive quality to them as well. Is this something you've thought about in your work?
Max Boyla: That's definitely something I think about a lot. I want my works to have both a micro and macro quality, so they feel vast and celestial, almost like they’re tapping into that fourth-dimensional space. There’s this sci-fi element to them, something otherworldly. But at the same time, they also feel like they have a micro existence, almost like atoms or molecules. I kind of want all these possibilities to exist in my work. Not necessarily all in one work, but for my works to have this openness to them where people can bring their own thoughts. Like for Fire of Love, someone told me it looks like DNA, and I hadn't even thought of that.
LVH Art: I noticed you created the SOS sign in the telephone booth next to the Royal Academy. I was quite surprised to learn that, as it's not the medium I would typically associate with your work.
Max Boyla: I like this John Cage quote, “if all music is sound, then all sound can be music.” So I was kind of thinking about that in terms of materiality – if all paint is material, then all material can be used as paint. In that way I’m also quite interested in neon – it feels like you're drawing or painting with almost pure light. It sort of touches on these ideas of consumerism and the history of advertising, that I also find intriguing.
For the SOS sign the RA purchased those boxes from the phone company, and they wanted to do a rotation of students' work in them, but I wrote this proposal that used all three phone boxes for one installation, which they really liked. It was installed during the time of COVID, and being stuck in a confined space, like the neon is on those phone boxes, felt highly relevant to that moment. It is also about communication, lapses, and dead technology. As phone boxes are becoming more and more obsolete, I found it interesting that they were designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and read that the design was inspired by the tombstone of his wife. The title of the work “The Sound of Silence” is also a reference to a Simon Garfunkel song, though I’m more into The Chromatics cover.
LVH Art: Have there been any artists, from the past or present, who have particularly inspired you or who you are thinking about a lot lately?
Max Boyla: Yeah there's loads. I think when I started getting into art I was fascinated by Rene Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. I am also a big fan of Philip Guston and Louise Bourgeois. Then there is Bernard Piffaretti. I really like his work, also because he often works in a diptych format, which I often work with. I was amazed when I saw his work, and was surprised by how someone was doing diptychs as their “whole thing”.
