West, London
Sebastián Espejo
The Other Summer
Union PacificFor many years, Espejo would produce a painting a day: starting in the morning by chosing a corner of his studio, a field, a piece of fruit, any pretext for an exercise in sustained attention that would produce, by the end of the morning, a finished painting that accurately recorded the very effects and changes of light over that specific period in that specific place. In this exhibition he presents a body of work produced in a different way: each painting is made up of several different sessions, sometimes over a period of several years. What was initially a process of recording a small but intense period is now spread over several sessions separated in time. As a result, the paintings become more self-contained, more self-conscious, and therefore more layered. What started life as a picture of something at a particular time and place, now becomes a picture that undergoes a process of analysis and adaptation that has more to do with the painting itself than with the circumstances of its origin. They are, to a certain extent, paintings of paintings. Espejo’s work has always been a conscious exercise in attentive viewing. As we become aware of the effects of the attention economy and surveillance capitalism on our individual and social lives, the ability to own and use one’s own attention freely has become an activity as valuable as it is radical. Attention has become one of the most valuable financial commodities in the world, as can be seen by the immense fortune accumulated by those companies whose primary product is the time we voluntarily spend on their platforms (Meta, Alphabet, etc.). In this regard, what may seem to some to be a withdrawal from the world into personal reflection and meditation, can also be understood as an entirely necessary reclaiming of our core human ability to be in charge of how and why we attend to the world around us. To learn to know what we want to know. In the works presented in this exhibition we can see a shift in how Espejo deals with attention. Attention is still the raw material of his art, but while in his previous works, attention was consciously targeted and processed in the present moment, in this recent body of work, attention has shifted from the present moment to encompass a new back-and-forth complexity. By shifting his attention back to his own paintings after some time has passed, the artist creates something of a collage or pentimento. The task of revisiting becomes a new opportunity to adjust and change, just as we are constantly revisiting moments from the past in our own memories, what the artist has called “a mestizo, impure and mixed space.” The title of this exhibition is taken from a poem by the Chilean poet Gonzálo Millan, in which he describes how the bark on a tree slowly grows over the initials carved by two lovers in “the other summer.” Time goes on, new growth emerges, memories fail, but the inscription on the tree remains both on trunk and in the people’s memories in a dialogue that loses in precision as time passes, but gains in pathos and density. —Gabriel Peréz-Barreiro Sebastián Espejo (b. 1990, Santiago, Chile) currently lives and works in London. Espejo’s work centres on the transience and beauty of everyday life, with the narrative of his works following everyday environments, intentionally lacking any single event. This translation of environmental experience into painting connects his work to the Chilean pictorial tradition of ‘descriptive realism,’ defined by its direct sensory capture of transient moments. Espejo sees himself as an inheritor of this tradition and its artistic philosophy.