Espace Vanhomwegen
Rue de Russie 31
1060 Saint-Gilles

Built with Berta.me

  1. UPCOMING :

     

    Matt Boyle - Holy Island

    9/11 - 22/11/2025 

    Vernissage : 8/11/2025 - 18:00 > 22:00

     

    Holy Island is a series of paintings, drawings and collages that attempt to infiltrate

    and accelerate the untrustworthy representations and narratives that are often

    preserved in archived imagery, notes and ephemera.

    Inspired by a move into a new studio, Boyle reconnected with a catalogue of

    material generated on a research trip to Los Angeles in 2018. This material was to

    act as ground work in which to try and write episodic tv and fiction, but the

    images, objects and sounds demanded more interrogation and eventually through

    a new studio practice Boyle has begun to try harvest this period of research,

    using it as experimental reference for the holy island project.

     

    The paintings surface, gesture, structure aim to mobilise the agitated and fevered

    transactions that saturated and underpinned his experience of moving through

    the city, walking daily, for hours at a time. Washes of colour build in an effort to

    allow architectural fragments, flailing limbs, abandoned clothing, faded

    vegetation, halloween paraphernalia, reflections to be woven together, figures

    are supplanted or overrun by shadows, faces are distracted, unavailable or lost,

    voyeuristic observation combined with edges of strange conversation are

    presented like a slow motion blinking.

     

    Boyle both uses and rejects the material, he instead will fold in or force open a

    painting by smudging, distorting or naively segwaying into current surroundings,

    using his journey through the suburbs of Leeds to challenge and insure the motifs

    aren’t operating comfortably. Boyle’s work with film and performance can also be

    traced, thought provoking compositions, framing, images that reference location

    scouting or documented surveillance, his paintings carry a sense of an ending, or

    of important beats, a pictoral space jamming or subverting fact and fiction.