To say Maxime Büchi has been busy is an understatement. Father of three, tattoo artist and founder of Sang Bleu Studio, publisher of the iconic now defunct Sang Bleu magazine and TTTISM magazine, he has also designed fonts for Swiss Typefaces, watches for Hublot and clothes for Sang Bleu Studio. We had a chat in his studio in Dalston to the soundtrack of a continuous buzzing of tattoo needles.
VASSILIS KARIDIS : Coming to the interview I was thinking that, of all the stuff you have done—from the typefaces, to tattooing, to designing magazines—for me, the most intimidating is taking care of the baby twins.
MAXIME BÜCHI: It’s the most intimidating for me as well. It’s as crazy as you think it is. We had never—neither me nor my wife—experienced something as challenging but it’s fine. In Switzerland, where I’m from, military service is mandatory; I didn’t do it but most people do. A friend of mine once told me that the one thing he learned from the military is that whenever you think that you’ve gone as far as you could, you can still go at least once as far again. And you know I feel that with the kids. I’m like, “Wow! I didn’t know I could sleep so little!” But I can still wake up every day and go to work and be functional and yes, here we are!
VK: What happens when you’re away for work?
MB: Well, I’ll be honest with you, it’s a problem because I have had to travel on long trips. We don’t have family around, we spend all our money on childcare, nannies and stuff, to the point where we’re like, “Okay, what do we do now?” So, over the summer we’re going to move to California where my wife is from. We need people to help us, we need help from our friends and family, because, right now, it’s a vicious circle: the more I work, the more we need help and the more we spend on childcare the more money I need to make; It’s really tricky and we need to figure it out. It was fine with one kid but now it’s compromising our lifestyle…
VK: So, you’re going open Sang Bleu LA?
MB: Yes, we’re going to keep London open but we’re going to open something there as well.
VK: You were raised in Switzerland and at some point, you moved to Paris?
MB: I lived in Paris for about ten months.
VK: Working as a designer?
MB: Yes, as a graphic designer. Then I moved to London for a year, then back to Switzerland for two years, then back to London.
VK: That’s when you started Sang Bleu, the magazine. That was almost ten years ago?
MB: Yes, ten years ago, maybe. I think I probably started working on it a bit more than that, but I think the first issue came out ten years ago.
VK: You didn’t tattoo back then?
MB: No, no.
VK: At what point did you decide to start tattooing?
MB: I always liked tattoos. I always thought they were fascinating but I didn’t picture myself as a tattooist—I never even considered it. One day, in my early twenties, the guy who was tattooing me [Filip Leu], someone I had a lot of admiration for, offered to take me on as an apprentice, out of the blue, during a conversation. This switched something in my head and made me think, “Yes, of course”. I told the tattooist, “You know, I’m still studying”; I would have probably dropped out of school if he’d told me, “No, the offer is now” but he didn’t, he said, “No, finish your studies, get back to me when you’re done.” And that’s what I did. I graduated, I took a couple of years doing my thing, I went to Zurich and then Paris and then London and one day I called him up and I was like, “I’m coming back to Switzerland if the offer still stands? What do you say?” And he said, “Yes, come down and we’ll do it.”
VK: After your apprenticeship, you returned to London to open Sang Bleu Studio?
MB: After my apprenticeship, I came back to London where I was tattooing independently for three or four years before I opened the studio.
VK: I remember there was a lot of travelling then, to tattoo conventions?
MB: Yes, even though I was already in my early thirties, you need to pay your dues to the tattoo world if you want to open a shop. You can’t just open a shop like that.
VK: When did you stop publishing Sang Bleu?
MB: The magazine stopped after issue six which was before the studio opened. After that I just didn’t feel the need for it anymore, I didn’t have the drive to do something that would not be financially profitable or at least self-sufficient; I had better stuff to do and I didn’t have the energy or the drive to try and make it profitable. I was tattooing full time and loving it. But I think it was also a different time for the publishing industry in general; I could not see any interest in doing a print magazine; I didn’t have any interest for that. I wanted to focus on digital media and it’s only recently that I could see again what print media should be like.
VK: Hence TTTISM?
MB: Exactly.
VK: I read somewhere that you’re thinking of publishing a seventh issue of Sang Bleu?
MB: You know I did for a while, but I don’t think so. Sang Bleu has grown to be something else. Sang Bleu as a magazine was a manifesto, it was a vision of something that was happening ten years ago, that was both what I was experiencing as a person but also something that the world was going through. The progressive cross-weaving of cultural fields from fashion and fine arts and design, graphic design, the techniques, the culture, the individuals, all those things progressively being more and more fluid and more and more dynamically going from one to the other. But what happened then is I took each element that constituted Sang Bleu magazine and gave it its own life: from tattooing, to clothing, to design. I needed Sang Bleu ten or 12 years ago, to make sense of it all, but then it was done as a magazine. It was too experimental. I have no need now to bring it back to life, to make it a business. I prefer to leave the magazine as a mystical thing. Now I’m at a new stage: I went from a 20-year-old who needed to understand what I wanted to do in life to being an almost 40-year-old who has a family and needs to take all those things I’ve been doing for 13 years and make a living out of it. For me, TTTISM is an evolution of Sang Blue; Swiss Typefaces is another. Even Novembre Magazine, I’m not involved in it anymore but–
VK: I was going to ask about Novembre—so you aren’t actively involved these days?
MB: No, I completely handed it over a while ago, maybe six years ago, but for me even when I see what Novembre is today—because it’s still pretty true to its original definition—I’m, “Yes, that’s it“. It’s very close to what—in terms of vision, aesthetically and artistically—I would have liked it to become if I were still involved.
To me this is still an extension of what Sang Blue was and to be honest, when I see dozens, maybe hundreds of tattoo artists today, tattoo media, tattoo studios, even magazines that have been influenced by Sang Blue—this is all Sang Blue, this is the evolution. I don’t need to go back to this. I’m much more interested to understand now how all those things can still exist and be both philosophically coherent and sincere and true to what I was trying to do but can also exist in real life—not just be a little fantasy hobby thing. Because, at the end of the day, cool, but anyone can save up or borrow some money and go print a magazine; it doesn’t mean that it’s relevant, it just means that you found the money to print it. For me the first reality check was to see that what I put together in my little bedroom, people actually vibed with; but now the reality check—also corresponding to the life stage that I’m at—is to make a living off it. I have a family to feed and I don’t need to make more statements about who I am. I’ve done it, I’m happy, I’m perfectly fulfilled with narcissistic validation. For me, now, all that counts is feeding my family, myself, all the people who work around me; I don’t need recognition.
VK: How do you time-manage? How do you juggle family, tattoos, magazines, travelling for work…
MB: There are two things. I’m an expert at optimising things and my time, especially. At school, I could never learn things if I didn’t understand how they worked in the bigger picture. So, for example, if I learnt something in maths, I needed to understand how it worked with the physics classes and then how that would be coherent with biology. Then I was, “Okay, so how is this coherent with what I’m learning in the philosophy class or psychology or history?” I cannot retain—I have no interest in getting—information if it doesn’t help me understand the world, if it doesn’t improve my—in German there’s a term Weltanschauung—the vision of the world. And you know that’s something that made it difficult for me to study at times, because you go to school and it’s all “maths, maths, maths” and then there’s no effort to make these things coherent and so a lot of things are never retained.
But the things that are retained, they make so much sense to me and I can use them really well. And so, now that I’m not at school anymore but I’m in the real world, I only do something if it makes sense in a general bigger picture. I see all the things I do as just elements of one big thing. I never do anything that’s a waste of time in that respect. When I’m tattooing, I will immediately wonder how it relates to design, how it relates to the business, how it relates to the people around me, how it relates to my family. When I do one thing, it’s always useful on every level—it’s very much like cooking. At the end of the day, I have fairly normal days, it’s just that there’s no losses almost; losses make me really, really anxious. Most people have a notion that there’s work and there’s not-work; I don’t have this notion. If I go somewhere with my family and I’m on “holidays”, I might be taking photos of my family in a beautiful place but then I might see something and you know what, it would be a great photo for the background on a website or this could be inspiration for a tattoo, this could be something for… I’ll just take the photo, it’s there, it exists, I’ll use it later, you know what I mean?
The other thing, something really pragmatic as well: I’m quite organised. I’m not rigidly organised but I’m quite organised for the number of things I do. I’m also a geek, so I love things—I like to make things work, I love tools from physical tools to digital tools. I like the process of creating. I will always learn new things to be able to do things myself, so I’m not relying on a lot of other people, which is good and bad because sometimes you need to get over the, “No, I’ll do it myself” and that’s very hard as well.
VK: Now that you’re a father, are you drawn back to your origins? Would you consider moving back to Switzerland at some point?
MB: I don’t think that Central and Northern Europeans have this thing of returning to their roots so much, they’re more: Go. It depends, it depends. It’s a very good question because the real honest truth of it is that I think I would like my kids to grow up in Switzerland, because that’s what’s familiar; I cannot picture them growing up in America. I’m sure it would be fine if we end up doing it, but the only thing I can picture easily and feel comfortable with, is imagining them growing up in Switzerland. It’s quite a possibility as well that we might be in the US for a couple of years and then settle down completely in Switzerland. So, yes, the answer is yes, absolutely, especially now. When I was a kid, the West was a friendly place–
VK: It’s not so anymore.
MB: It’s not anymore. For me, when you have children, safety—both in a certain moment but also over time—becomes–
VK: It becomes essential.
MB: Yes. And the safest place I can think of is Switzerland, so if I have that option, anything else is irrelevant automatically
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine, issue 17, March 2018. Interview by Vassilis Karidis.