If On A Winter’s Night: In Conversation with Elspeth Vince and Ryan Static

If On A Winter’s Night, a group show presented by Galleria Objets from 22.01.2026 to 27.01.2026, borrows its title from Italo Calvino’s 1979 postmodern novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. In Calvino’s text, the reader is positioned as the protagonist, addressed directly as “you.” The novel unfolds as a series of interrupted openings, shifting genres and voices, with reading itself as its central subject. Ambiguous and self-reflexive, it foregrounds subjectivity through fragmentation and surrealist dislocation.

This logic carries into the exhibition, which brings together emerging artists selected through an open call. The show invites the gallery-goer to occupy the position of Calvino’s traveller, undertaking a journey without a fixed destination. In this sense, If On A Winter’s Night becomes an exhibition about art itself: how art is encountered, assembled, and made meaningful through experience.

John Dewey’s aesthetic framework of art as experience provides a useful lens for approaching this structure. For Dewey, artworks are shaped by an artist’s sensibility in order to generate unified and meaningful experiences. Artworks emerge from a pervasive quality or mood and are designed to facilitate experience in the viewer. The artist must undergo an experience in the act of making, and the viewer, in turn, must have an analogous experience for the object to be apprehended as art. This reciprocal relation situates art as an experiential microcosm through which broader modes of perception can be grasped.

To supplement this framework, we spoke with two exhibiting artists, Ryan Static and Elspeth Vince, about the experiential conditions shaping their practices. Placing these artists in dialogue offers a way into the metaphysical questions the exhibition quietly poses.

Ryan’s work is guided by emotion and urgency and driven by instinct rather than deliberation.

RS: When I feel excitement from an image, that’s the driving force. I need to paint it as fast as I can so it exists. It’s instinctual—following a feeling.

Elspeth’s process similarly begins in feeling, but is rooted in experimentation and bodily exploration. There is a moment of recognition—a click—that allows the work to unfold.

EV: I make lots of drawings of postures or vignettes that feel right—loose shapes that create a feeling. I then bend and twist into these positions myself to see how they register in my body, take reference images, and bring everything together into one drawing that feels resolved.

Sustaining artistic labour beyond impulse requires a central concern that anchors the process. For Elspeth, this is an ongoing engagement with the unrested body.

EV: Painting often feels static, but I’m drawn to what disrupts that stillness—bodies caught between movement and rest. Burial positions, half-formed figures, reanimation. These states don’t resolve; they hold more than one truth. A body can be living and dead, powerful and powerless. Painting can hold those contradictions too.

This attention to bodily paradox feels aligned with lived corporality. Bodies are inherently multiple: they shift, contort, expand, and occupy space unevenly. Painting, however, can suspend this flux, holding a stillness the body never fully attains. Elspeth’s work dwells in that tension.

EV: I’m interested in discomfort—something uncanny that brings awareness back to the body. The figures are curled, bound, or contorted, suggesting stillness and death while retaining traces of life. Movement and stasis coexist, both visually and conceptually.

On Dewey’s terms, Elspeth’s art-making experience finds reciprocity in the viewer’s bodily awareness. Ryan’s work, by contrast, engages the viewer more cognitively.

RS: I try to communicate my outlook on life—it’s dark, but with moments of beauty. No matter how heavy things get, there’s always light to be found. That’s what keeps people going.

This interplay of light and darkness is embedded formally in Ryan’s paintings. His figures are rendered with realism against sparse or absent backgrounds, a contrast central to his practice.

RS: I like to keep things simple. I don’t spend time on anything that doesn’t add to the main focus. The background becomes a representation of my mind—a kind of endless void where anything can surface, especially memories.

These formal decisions echo the logic of memory itself. By isolating a focal point and stripping away excess, Ryan crystallises what made an impression, mirroring how memories surface selectively. The black, unified backgrounds function as expansive voids, against which saturated foreground figures appear as isolated recollections. Works such as The Bday Wish (2025) and The Birthday Party (2025) exemplify this strategy.

A similar logic of isolation appears in Elspeth’s practice. In Repetence (2025), a face is presented without a body, cropped and unstable, offering just enough for the viewer to fixate on the eyes while denying context. Containment is central here.

EV: We instinctively imagine the whole from a part, but in this painting, only the eyes exist. They become both subject and frame. I’m interested in fragments—of paintings, images, or bodies—and how they shape our experience of what remains. When something survives only in pieces, it holds both presence and absence.

Within aesthetics, fragmentation need not undermine meaning; it can generate it. Deliberate ambiguity—present in both artists’ compositional strategies—echoes Calvino’s fractured narrative structure. Meaning emerges subjectively, through the viewer’s impulse to complete what is missing. Paradoxically, absence intensifies presence: the isolated birthday scene or ocular fragment accrues weight through what it withholds.

Both artists work figuratively, drawing directly from lived experience—shared humanity, body, and mind—while engaging with discomfort and vulnerability. Such exposure carries risk, but also the potential for deep viewer resonance. Ryan reflects on this tension candidly.

RS: It feels very exposed. Growing up, showing emotion made you a target, so you learnt to shut it down. When I started painting, I had so much built up that I wanted it to be as hard-hitting as those feelings were. I don’t really care anymore, but that vulnerability still lingers.

Matching emotional intensity with formal directness becomes a way of doing justice to feeling itself. This process is cathartic for the artist and affirming for the viewer, who encounters their own repressed or elusive emotions mirrored back. Like Calvino’s novel, the exhibition prompts introspection, drawing attention to the act of looking itself.

In Elspeth’s work, intensity is reinforced through recurring warm, fleshy tones.

EV: The colours aren’t illustrative of emotion, but establish an affective temperature—bodily, intimate, slightly uncomfortable. I often think in terms of “blood heat.” Even when painting a lifeless body, the colour suggests something still moving beneath the skin.

The paint surface itself holds tension: dragged marks, wiped passages, corrections that register friction and control. This material instability becomes part of the affective charge.

EV: Friction is crucial. Scraping and wiping can’t be separated from frottage—it’s an intuitive act, almost like care. I became focused on painting instability: letting forms dissolve, edges blur, gestures remain unfinished. As I remove paint with solvent, I allow the painting to decide what it wants to be.

Across both practices, instability, fragmentation, and experiential reciprocity operate as guiding principles. If On A Winter’s Night ultimately resists closure, asking viewers to inhabit uncertainty and construct meaning through their own perceptual journey—much like Calvino’s traveller, forever mid-passage.

Sincerely, 

Galleria Objets