The Unseen Self

Opera Gallery Beirut

10 December - 08 January 2027

Opera Gallery Beirut is proud to present an exhibition bringing together the contemporary practices of Spanish artists Xevi Solà and Cristina Babiloni. Though their methods diverge—one tethered to the psychological human form, the other to raw, terrestrial abstractions—both artists explore the boundaries of what lies just beneath immediate appearances. Across both practices, what remains visible on the canvas serves as a mere point of departure for exploring what cannot be fully seen, articulated, or known.

Xevi Solà

In Solà’s figurative oil paintings, characters inhabit carefully simplified, vibrant scenes that are at once familiar and deeply enigmatic. Sun-drenched swimming pools and leisure spaces provide the backdrops for these encounters, subverting idyllic spaces into moments of quiet, isolating anticipation. A tense gesture, an averted gaze, or the deliberate physical distance between two subjects hints at an underlying relationship, yet its exact psychological nature is purposefully left unresolved. Drawing heavily on imagery from photography and cinema, Solà reworks his sources through an intuitive use of bold color fields that pulls focus entirely onto the figures, leaving their inner narratives suspended.

Cristina Babiloni

Conversely, Babiloni approaches the canvas as a raw process of physical construction and environmental discovery. Working with organic materials associated with the natural world, construction, and the industrial ceramic trade, she builds her heavy, cratered compositions through successive, highly tactile layers. Matter, color, and texture dictate the artwork's depth and movement, where rich shades of blue evoke marine ecosystems while textured horizons mirror active geological formations. These atmospheric associations remain fluid; Babiloni’s structural surfaces leave wide, generous room for individual viewer responses, allowing each work to be encountered entirely on its own terms.

What lies beneath the Surface

In bringing these two distinct bodies of work together, ‘The Unseen Self’ considers what is held at a distance. In Solà’s work, the inner lives of his characters are present through subtle physical cues but never fully disclosed to the viewer. In Babiloni’s, the completed terrain carries the raw, permanent traces of an experimental building process where historic layers are transformed, buried, and concealed beneath others. Ultimately, the exhibition invites the viewer to look beyond the immediate surface of the paint to confront the hidden dimensions that ground our existence.

Cristina Babiloni, "Deep Sea III" (detail), 2024, mixed media on burlap, 160 x 160 cm | 63 x 63 in.; Xevi Solà, "Pool 2" (detail), 2026, acrylic on linen, 81 x 65 cm |31.9 x 25.6 in.