Xevi Solà, Endless Sun-days

Opera Gallery is pleased to present Xevi Solà’s first solo show in New York, featuring a series of fifteen new paintings. 'Endless Sun-days' captures the youth spending weekends sunbathing by a pool, gathering in a friend’s garden for brunch, or simply relaxing. Drawing inspiration from fashion shoots, mugshots, and Hollywood films, Solà creates psychological portraits that invite viewers to imagine the narrative behind each image.

Different sources of inspiration

In Dimanche 1, Solà depicts four young people lounging by a sunlit pool, each positioned differently, their feet dipped into the water in a shared, contemplative silence. Time appears to pause. Inspired in part by David Hockney’s iconic swimming pool series, Solà conveys a similar sense of long, languid summer days, yet through a distinctly contemporary lens. As the artist explains, “If I had to define this series, I would say that it is a kind of collective psychological portrait. Sunseekers or serial chillers, these characters try to relax in a shiny and colorful environment, but grey clouds are hidden behind their sunglasses. I'm not entirely sure why.”

Taking cues from the glamour of 1970s Hollywood cinema, Solà’s paintings subtly evoke the atmospheric tension that one could sense while watching the psychological thriller La Piscine (1969), in which Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin navigate a simmering drama of desire and jealousy during a summer in the South of France. His work also recalls Slim Aarons’s iconic Poolside Gossip photographs, capturing the sun-drenched leisure of California society women.

Solà reveals: “As a kid, I was very much a homebody, and my source of inspiration for landscapes was movies; therefore, the landscape in my pictorial films is more akin to the landscape in the United States than in my country.” 

A fast and spontaneous brush

Before he begins painting, Solà creates numerous tiny drawings, often executed in a single stroke. He then transfers these ideas onto canvas, painting quickly to preserve their spontaneity. Like 20th and 21st-century artists such as Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chantal Joffe, and Elizabeth Peyton, he is interested in capturing the essence of a subject. As Solà shares, “I fall in love with people who live their beauty without being aware of it. Sometimes they are people I know; sometimes I have to build a portrait from photos to convey that idea. I’m looking to portray self-confidence.”

These psychological portraits function almost like an intimate diary one could write on their summertime. We invite you to immerse yourself in these dreamlike landscapes and imagine the relationships between the characters, the conversations they share, and the worlds they inhabit. This new body of work highlights Solà’s ability to build a distinct visual universe and demonstrates the power of contemporary figurative painting.