Matt Boyle
Holy Island
9.11.2025 - 22.11.2025
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.
