Uncertain Interiors: reflecting on Jason Sumray’s Oil Paintings and Etchings 2020 – 2026.
Dan Paling Writer/Theatre Critic
In September 2026 I accepted my first job as a gallery attendant. I was apprehensive on my first day; recent art heists in Europe sent flashing images into my mind of crafty burglars and security lasers. But I soon realised that Highgate Gallery in North London has none of this jeopardy. Instead, the job became an extraordinary opportunity to closely study the work of a single artist. I spent days examining the still life paintings and etchings of London painter Jason Sumray. I have never given so many hours to a single body of work and, over two weeks, new interpretations emerged continuously. As visitors shuffled in and out, the art’s meanings began to blend with the building itself, to mirror the history of the gallery. This essay reflects on the experience of spending long tracts of time in the company of paintings.
The exhibition is Jason Sumray’s second solo show at Highgate Gallery. He’s showing a series of oil paintings and etchings produced over six years. The canvases depict objects set on tables emerging from darkness: formidable jugs and bowls loom over spoons and plates; fruit balances in the shadows between pots. The characters of Sumray’s work seem conscious of their own presence. The gravitas of each object imposes itself on the silence of the room.
Sitting on the bench in the middle of the hall, the eyes are drawn up the nineteenth-century skylight. Constructed in 1880, Victoria Hall stands on the footprint of a centuries-old stable yard (the earliest building of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution dates to at least the mid-seventeenth century). The hall is still the most recent addition to the Institution’s grounds, and, as the hours passed, I realised that its history has a special relationship with Sumray’s work.
The high windows of Victoria Hall spread light across the paintings within. This brightness harkens back to the building’s stable yard past, when the Highgate sky would have been visible from what is now the gallery floor. This transition from exterior to interior is built into the gallery’s structure. It’s as if the room is caught between the safety of its four walls and exposure to the London elements.
Sumray’s paintings are in dialogue with this architecture, concerned too with the relationship between inside and out. Crepuscular blackness cascades down the work as if a paint dam has burst, leaching its contents into the canvas. There is a dislocated domesticity here – no homely backdrops or explicit human figures, but abstracted fragments of interior life. Kitchen objects are suspended in a kind of everywhere-nowhere. Are we inside or out? What has become of floors and ceilings? What do we make of empty open drawers?
The shards of Sumray’s bright paint might suggest ruined surroundings, as if roofs have exploded to allow natural light inside. Miraculously, the explosions have left tables and objects intact. Now, in the post-bang silence, the fruit slowly rots and jugs fill with rainwater.
I glance up again to the skylight and scan the room. Looking more closely, I notice that the objects themselves are uncomfortable in their skin. A pear balances at an impossible angle; a spoon seems to fry in its own brilliant pigment. Human objects struggle against the interiors that contain them. They want to run away.
And then I notice the ladders: ladders that suggest escape, ascension, liberation. They narrow towards the boundaries of the canvases, as if the opportunity to evacuate is closing. They lead the viewer’s eyes out of the artwork and up, again, to the rooflight in the hall. In this way, too, Sumray’s work colludes with the design of the gallery.
But there’s a puzzle here. Just as the ladders lead us out of the works, they also draw us back into their depths. There are clues that the ladders are not simply escape routes: in the painting below, a shining thread is pulled taut by the bulk of a fruit dish. The dish is glued to the table by a blend of dark colour – as if refusing to be lifted from the frame. There’s an invitation here to linger with this dish. Sumray is an expert at capturing the ambivalence between staying and going, between looking closely and climbing away.
By inviting viewers to linger in the warm depths of his paintings, Sumray’s work echoes the original function of the gallery itself. The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution was established in 1839 to educate working people about the rapidly industrialising world around them. Before the formation of public libraries, groups like the HLSI were founded on principles of public enlightenment. In the simplest sense, the society’s mission was to invite people inside, to warm their feet and enlarge their imaginations. By calling viewers into its depths, Sumray’s work mirrors the founding principle of the HLSI: stay here, look closely, ask questions.
After spending two weeks at Jason Sumray’s exhibition, I realised new ways of thinking about art. Long-term study of Sumray’s work opened a dialogue between painting, history and architecture that was not available to the casual, half-hour visitor. The arc of London’s history had merged, somehow, with the deep colours and dark margins of the canvases. I felt privileged to have experienced this meeting.
I left the gallery on my final day hoping that artistic collaborations continue to flourish at Highgate. The HLSI has championed adventurous creatives for 300 years; spurred on by work like Sumray’s, it will do so for centuries to come. Emerging from Victoria Hall into a warm autumn afternoon, the familiar sound of horses’ hooves echoed down the high street. I looked over my shoulder at the gallery, which seemed to sway in acknowledgment as the animals disappeared down Highgate Hill.
