Request preview Lustre, an exhibition by London-based painter, Sebastián Espejo (b.1990, Chile), presented alongside works by Pierre Bonnard. As well as Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige, artists that both Espejo and Bonnard frequently reference.
Sebastián Espejo (b. 1990) - is a Chilean artist based in London, whose practice centres on painting with a focus on exploring the language of the natural world, still lives and the perception of light. Espejo often directly references the historic work of his influences. He has exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe, Asia, and the Americas; In 2025, he had a residency at Drumlanrig Castle and has been selected for Fugger Kunsthof residency in Augsburg, and after his Interval exhibition, he has two major upcoming solo exhibitions:
Union Pacific in London and
Sun Gallery in Seoul.
In Espejo’s quiet and poetic work, one immediately recalls the techniques, aesthetics and mark making of his historic artist influences, aligning with the ethos of Interval.
Interval is dedicated to bringing together the contemporary with historic artworks that directly connect to each other, be it aesthetics, techniques, sources of inspiration and the subject matter, creating conversations and links between the artists and their practices.
An essay on ‘
Lustre: Sebastián Espejo and Pierre Bonnard’ by
Luis Pérez-Oramas, a Venezuelan art historian and poet who served as Curator of Latin American Art at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 2006 to 2017, will be accompanying the exhibition.
Interval is founded and curated by father and son,
David and Jacob Gryn, dedicated to bringing leading contemporary artists work together with historic artworks, exploring aesthetic dialogues, ideas and connections between the works and their eras. Interval is a recently renovated 1790’s Georgian townhouse at 73 Compton Street, Clerkenwell, London. The inaugural show at Interval was “NOBLEcurve” by LA-based artist Petra Cortright, alongside old master works in collaboration with Sam Fogg and Rafael Valls Gallery.
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) Born into a bourgeois family in Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, Bonnard attended law school at his father's insistence, but his true interest lay in art. After failing his law exams, he worked as a clerk in a government office while studying art at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1888, after competing unsuccessfully in the Prix de Rome competition, he left the École des Beaux-Arts, continuing his art studies at the Académie Julian. There he was introduced to the theories of Paul Gauguin by fellow student Paul Sérusier.
In late 1888 Bonnard, Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard and others formed the Nabis, an artistic brotherhood based on Gauguin's theories. In the following years he designed posters and sketches for the symbolist periodical "La Revue Blanche", produced lithographic illustrations for several books published by Ambroise Vollard, and collaborated on the sets for the first production of Alfred Jarry's play "Ubu Roi." Art critics of the period dubbed Bonnard and Vuillard "Intimists," because many of their pictures depicted intimate scenes in interior settings.
Wildenstein & Co. is a private art dealership established in 1875, with an emphasis on Old Masters and Impressionists.
Special thanks to the
Kentoni Collection for the loan of the Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, Japanese woodblock prints.
Contact -
jacob@interval-clerkenwell.art for all enquiries.
__
Sebastián Espejo: Skirmish of Mirrors by Luis Pérez-Oramas
The name of Sebastián Espejo bears some premonitory connotations. For a painter whose family name translates into English simply as “mirror”, the polysemous yield is as rich as it is multifaceted. Nothing is, however, simple about mirrors since in their reflection they often conflate the clarity and the uncertainty of images.
Pointedly, the nominal chance-effect of Sebastián Espejo's family name is the fact that the artist has labeled his most recent series of paintings under the general title of “Lustre”. This single word conveys several meanings that echo, beyond the agency of mirrors, the accidents of light: the gleaming, the flaming, the glowing, the shining.
There is a lustre of mirrors, too. Iridescence belongs to a general constellation of phenomena related to the perception of reflecting surfaces as coordinates where the blind impulsion of light appears, precisely, in its lustrous beaming.
The type of images that we find in mirrors has a technical name: they are indexical traces, not icons nor symbols. They are not the result of crafty decisions, nor are they intentional signs: rather they are vestigial indications, tracking marks of a presence that has occurred. It does not depend on us that indexical traces such as reflections take place. Anything located in front of a given reflective surface will therefore be reflected on it. It is because of this 'blind impulsion' of mirrors that they have been instrumental to the theoretical thinking of painting; it is because of their power that painters use them, depict them, imitate them.
Equally important is the fact that painting is made of traces, often manual and very intentional, indexical marks bearing witness to the decisive painter’s tools, as they are organised to produce images. Between the unintentional impulsion of mirror reflections and the entirely - if laborious – intentional becoming that results in painted images, a realm, a critical ‘interval’ opens: a field for the becoming of figures, for the agency of figurability, for the endless swirling between meta-stable and potential forms as they become significant paint matter, the actual body of images that constitute the flesh of painting.
Skirmish of mirrors: an arch that goes from the name of the painter to the paintings bearing his name - paintings within the painting, mirror-paintings of other paintings - might be a good pretext to try some ideas, some interpretative hypothesis on the recent work of Espejo.
Since I first came across Espejo's work, I was struck by the conceptual fittingness of his family name: here we have an artist who inscribes his endeavour within a history of painting devoted to reality, to perception, to the general, albeit uncertain, radiance of visible matter, as represented by his masterful craft - a work rooted in the physical vision of the world.
But if mirrors are fascinating devices, they are also historical, theoretical objects when it comes to revising the long history of painting's theory. It was Leon Battista Alberti, in his De Pictura (1435), who set the definitive regulation of mirrors over the Western canon of painting by affirming that, if an inventor of the art was to be named, it must have been Narcissus. That statement, which established an entire regime of images characterised by their power of reflection and self-reflection - mirror-images of the world - hung in Alberti’s text from a thread of words taking the form of an answered rhetorical question. As Alberti formulated his suggestion about Narcissus, the inventor of painting, he left floating a questioning assertion: "For what else can you call painting if not the embracing of images at the source of their reflection?"
Much has been discussed about this foundational text. On one hand, there is the idea of painting relating to the power of images, for which mirrors would be a model; on the other hand, as more recently has been argued, Alberti's suggestion appears to be two-fold: painting could consist, indeed in embracing images at their source - reality or imagination - following Narcissus’ fable, which also makes painting, as Alberti wrote "the flower of all arts", the fabulous fate of Narcissus metamorphosed into a flower being the mythical reference for that supplemental implication.
There is, thus, since the most significant treatise on painting written in the Quattrocento, both a florilegium and mirrors, floral blossoming of forms and unexpected reflections framing the very idea of painting.
Flowers, mirrors, surfaces of reflection, and fleeting images abound in Espejo's recent paintings. They are consistent, iconographically truthful, with the exemplum of still lifes: images of muted life, as they were called in ancient French - vie coye - depicting “the silence of things”. Rather than mirrors, Espejo's paintings show, however, in different configurations, objects made of reflecting materials, capable of mirroring light as local colours or radiance: glass, porcelain, crystal, even the polished skins of fruits.
Espejo's compositions for his show “Lustre” are consistent: they always depict a flat surface - a table, a ground - over which stand these muted things, these silent objects, randomly organised. One thinks of Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis, Ramón Gaya, and even ancient names of artists whose production is emblematic of the genre: Lubin Baugin, Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan Sánchez Cotán, Jean Siméon Chardin.
Opposed to the flat surface where the objects are set, following the convention of still life, Espejo stresses the vertical plane at the background of the image, coincident with the very painting's support, as a chosen field to feature various references to other artists: schematic, drafted, graphic sketches; phantomatic outlines of images by Pierre Bonnard, Camille Corot, Paul Gauguin, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai.
A chiasmus is thus implied in these works, as every one of Espejo's pictures bonds together a painting of objects with an object of painting: they all are, beyond their moving lightness, meta-paintings.
Espejo's oils on wood, notably those exhibited in this show, are thus brilliant heterochronic compositions: under one gaze, they feature multiple co-existing temporalities. Two salient aspects related to this dimension seem noticeable: the masterful delicacy of Espejo's brushstrokes, the velvety accuracy of his bodegones inhabited by minute objects, shining on their surface like metaphysical landscapes, and the voluntary decision to bring the work of previous, old masters, in the form of rough, schematic, spectral poetic renditions. XXXAll and each of these new works by Espejo are thus subject to a dialectical interpretation: on one side, at their forefront, populated by muted objects, I find the flesh of painting, the sluggish, sensuous skin of reality; at their background, on the contrary, there are these rapid, summarising, fugacious depictions of the works that Espejo has elected from the family of his predecessors, referential artists, rendered as schemes, as synthetic drafts. Their names matter less than their schematic transfiguration as punctum within Espejo's paintings, which, in turn become, suddenly, their very mirrors, espejos suyos.
The great Gilles Deleuze, who addressed pointedly painting as sensation, used to praise, in his late days, painting as a 'diagrammatic' endeavour, stressing the power of schemes to convey the germinal chaos of images - chaos and germ, in Deleuze's terms-: "the schematic giving birth, by unmaking similarity, to the very presence of images." XXXBut one could also think that emerging from an uncontrolled mnemonic magma, these images of past artists appear in Espejo’s works as images on a mirror do: they are phantoms of the unforgettable that inform art by returning time and time again despite our precarious intentional recollections.
There is always something phantomatic about images in a mirror. I like to think that in the case of “Lustre”, this dimension refers, almost as an Ars poetica, to the intention of signifying the inevitability of memory as an informing flux over the painting process.
Certainly, these fugacious sketches at the back of Espejo's works, contrasting the memory of past masters with the actual silent life of objects, are appropriations, quotes, and explicit references. But there is something else to be interpreted about this contrast, about the tension that constitutes their iconographical settings: the clear opposition - the horizontal versus the vertical; the rough, schematic outlines versus the fleshy, cloudy, dense depictions of things - as if Espejo would like to stress the reality of presence against the fleeting, sudden advent of memory.
The systematic repetition of that model of representation, juxtaposing fully original still lifes with sketchy renditions of major historical figures’ images, suggests that Espejo is addressing, if intuitively, the double status of images as both stable presences and potential realities yet to become, surging from the uncontrolled dynamism of memory. The beauty of these paintings recalls to me a striking definition by Pascal Quignard: “I define beauty as the sentiment of piety towards what was invisible at its birthing.”
But Espejo knows that his works are also rooted in another, specific, memory: that of the great Spanish painter and poet Ramón Gaya, who, after the fall of the Spanish Republic, was forced to live in México for years, unable to return to Europe. Embodying the etymological roots of the word nostalgia -nostos/algos: the pain of returning- Gaya soothed his suffering by evoking the works of the great masters in a body of small paintings, much like the ones that Espejo proposes for this show, naming them, simply, Homenajes (Homages). Between 1946 and
The works that Espejo has conceived for “Lustre” are thus homages to those homages, which he voluntarily mirrors. Mirror of mirrors, paintings of paintings, echoing the masterful Gaya not only in the decision to keep with visible reality as a source, but also in the determination not to be entirely contemporary, in the courageous aim to accept the unexpected return of figural recollections. These are thus works about the multiplicity of times, paintings that come to trouble the orientation of time, tempested memories within the stasis of things.
Espejo might coincide with Ramón Gaya in one more aspect: that the goal of art is to save reality from artistic falsification, tricks, and artifices - to save reality from art. In 1952, the young Mexican poet, Tomás Segovia, a disciple of Gaya, wrote to his mentor an anguished letter about the end of beauty, about the suspicion that beauty was over, cancelled as an ideological fiction. Gaya’s answer resonates today, eloquently, radically, embracing the glowing lustre of Espejo’s works: “How come beauty does not exist? Yes, yes, it exists. It happens that beauty is not a value; it is a material.”
