Contemporary figurative art / narrative paintings on view >>>
“If I had to define this series, I would say it’s a kind of collective psychological portrait,” said Xevi Solà. “These figures are trying to relax in a bright and colorful environment, but gray clouds lurk behind their sunglasses.”
Exhibition Detail at a Glance:
“Xevi Solà: Endless Sun-Days”
Opera Gallery
New York, New York
February 12 – March 7, 2026
operagallery.com
From the gallery:
Influenced by fashion photography, film stills, and mugshots, Solà creates portraits with a cinematic dimension and suggestive storytelling. “As a child,” he says, “I was very much a homebody, and my source of inspiration for landscapes was cinema.”
In “Dimanche 1,” four figures sit by a pool, lost in silent contemplation, time seemingly suspended. While echoes of David Hockney’s iconic pool scenes can be perceived, Solà’s incisive, contemporary, and psychologically charged approach lends this moment a unique authenticity.
One can cite, for example, the glamour and tension of Mid-century French Riviera cinema, which Solà’s paintings evoke, particularly the psychological atmosphere of the 1969 film La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), in which Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin grapple with latent desire and jealousy during a summer in the South of France. The leisurely ideal and mid-20th-century elegance of Slim Aarons’s Poolside Gossip series find a similar resonance in Solà’s compositions, which are both familiar and dreamlike.
Working from spontaneous, single-stroke sketches, Solà paints quickly to preserve the immediacy and spontaneity of his creative process, thus placing his practice in the lineage of contemporary figurative painters such as Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chantal Joffe, and Elizabeth Peyton.
Presented together, the works in ‘Endless Sun-days’ read like an intimate, colorful, and cinematic visual diary. Viewers are invited to enter Solà’s suspended summer world and imagine the stories unfolding just beyond the frame.
Xevi Solà (b. 1969) is a Spanish painter who lives and works in Girona, Spain. He was born in Santa Coloma de Farners in Catalonia and he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona in 2007. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums across Europe, the United States, and Asia, including solo exhibitions at Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York, Alzueta Gallery in Barcelona, the Cuperior Collection and YIRI ARTS in Taipei. In 2024, he had his first solo exhibition with Opera Gallery at their Geneva, Switzerland location.
