Coinciding with the 2026 Edinburgh Art Festival, Ingleby is pleased to present its next ‘Instalment' in the gallery’s Feast Room, with the Chilean painter Sebastián Espejo.
Stepping into Espejo’s studio, currently located on the edge of an industrial estate in Northeast London, is a surprising experience. After passing through industrial bakeries and a recycling centre, the studio emits a warm glow. There is a smell of cedar, the sound of Tropicália, and the taste of nuts and dark chocolate figs offered from a traditional Chilean woven basket. Sebastián brews herbal tea and gestures to a seat; it's a haven in the thick of London’s urban sprawl.
Looking around the studio, it’s clear that Sebastian is a collector. Occupying every surface are objects that have travelled with the artist from other times and places - loyal companions as he calls them “...characters in a miniature theatre of light. They are a constellation in a world of variables… a tool and a device of contemplation. They seem to change each day. They act as my subject, my figure and at times my landscape.” Espejo is democratic in this process of discovery – these cherished objects are always humble, chosen for their integrity rather than their value, with no hierarchy between the pebbles, flowers and lichens.
In Espejo's paintings, worlds are framed within worlds. Often, in the foreground, a still life establishes the scene, set against a window looking out towards a landscape, seascape or star-scape. Each painting suggests a kind of contradiction - an openness to distant horizons, but often from within a space that is by its very nature enclosed, a window that holds the viewer in - a kind of philosophical juggle between an offer of infinity and its quotidian opposite.
Espejo paints these arrangements of his pocket-sized companions from life, but the worlds against which they are set stem from memory, drawing especially on memories of light in places that have captured his imagination - dappled sun in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the moonlit skies of Chile, the overcast greys of London – which he has described as the hardest light to capture, his greatest lesson. His paintings are sensory experiences, exploring light and colour through memory, but also in thinking instinctively in the present about taste: "colour arrangement is like flavour arrangement for a dish. It should have an intention, but there shouldn't always be a plan. It should feel fresh, or acidic, or sweet and warm, or crisp and cold."
As with all artists, Espejo sometimes allows other more external influences to come to the fore, and in doing so his references are far-reaching. In one conversation he cites Mary Cassatt, Francisco de Zurbarán and Katsushika Hokusai. He pours over books of astrological images of stars in the Chilean sky, scattering tiny, dotted constellations across the surface of his panels, layered with drawing, oil and texture. There is something deeply romantic about the way he sees and experiences the world. For him, looking at the stars is like looking at a performance of the past, light years away, and this cosmological fascination has become his means of describing the contrary connections between tiny and vast; interior and exterior; inanimate and living. "Stars and vases”, he says, "lichens and forests, stones and mountains. I hope that people feel an openness when they look at the works, as well as a sense of intimacy.”