Xevi Solà

Xevi Solà is a Spanish painter whose intuitive and painterly figurative works invite the viewer to consider how much they can know about a subject at first glance. Sensitive to subtle gestures and facial expressions, Solà’s paintings might be understood as a new way of understanding psychological portraiture, reimagined with a unique lightness of touch and a sympathetic eye. Often, he paints from found imagery, bringing the subjects of fashion shoots, mugshots and Hollywood films together, united by his deft and sensitive visual language. Solà was born in Santa Coloma de Farners, Spain in 1969. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at University of Barcelona in 2007 and now lives and works in Girona, Spain.

Solà belongs to a rich tradition of painters who bend the rules of traditional figuration in order to capture a more elusive likeness. Like 20th and 21st century artists including Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chantal Joffe and Elizabeth Peyton, he is more interested in painting the essence of a subject than their exact physical likeness. To this end, he works quickly in order to avoid second-guessing the marks that he commits to the canvas. In Solà’s words, “I think that in contemporary painting it is better if you act on instinct, when we try to leave consciousness aside and only use what we have learned automatically.” Within this paradigm, he references Picasso as the most important figure.

Though he often works from photographs, Solà’s paintings are far from being reproductions. Many of his scenes are composites of multiple images, deliberately filtered through the artist’s own sensibility and technique. He describes his works as speaking of his own mistakes, successes, mood and dreams as much as they speak of the photographs that they reference. To this end, he works in an idiosyncratic colour palette that draws equally from historical artworks whose colours catch his attention and from his own imagination. “For me, a painting should be a space where colour flows freely,” he says.

There is a certain quietness to Solà’s work; he is interested in telling the stories of his subjects using small details rather than sweeping gestures. In doing so, he loads each subtle movement with a number of possible symbolic resonances. The figures themselves, of course, remain silent — so it is left up to the viewer to imagine the story behind the image. Recently, his paintings have become increasingly minimal. Often, characters appear isolated in space with an open void for a backdrop, a device to focus the energy to the central subject of the painting: the human. In this heightened world, every movement, every brushstroke, means something. 

In 2010, Solà’s work was included in the Biennale d’Art of Girona and in 2014 he was awarded the Young Art Award at the Taipei Contemporary art fair. His work has been exhibited around the world in cities including Geneva, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro and Paris and can be found in a number of important public and private collections around the world.