Aiden
2022. Oil on canvas. 75 x 62 cm.
Xevi Sola Serra is a Spanish painter working with figuration from a bold and powerful perspective. The characters he depicts are unique, rare and beautiful, each one of them captured in a modest and intimate moment. His works, far from showing just what is there at plain sight, capture a feeling, a sensation that is there and that creates a tacit bond between the onlooker and the painter.
Wearing colorful and eye-catching attires, the people portrayed in his artworks are made using colorful strokes that tend to create even more deepness in their looks and highlight their intriguing and captivating poses. Xevi’s work serves as a reminder of the beauty in boldness and rarity, and how figurative art can still be edgy and aligned with our times.
”I paint quickly, more than ever, to regain freshness. It doesn’t always work, what’s more, I often spoil pictures and start over and over again, looking for the gesture, like someone who practices a new signature and I draw a lot.
Now, the most important thing for me is the painting, the gesture, the color; the form, in short. I am in the process of forgetting the strictly narrative part of the painting. This evolution takes time and I consider this change as a journey of no return. A journey I started when a couple of exhibitions ago I remove characters from my paintings, leaving only landscapes in them. Following the same idea, I recover the characters, but now they no longer shout, they don’t even speak. Now they are here for their forms to be observed. Little by little I free myself from the need to explain, without giving up figuration because it is the instrument that keeps me sane. Still, I have to admit that abstraction has an increasingly hypnotic influence on me.
I have doubted a lot, but I think that this reset was necessary to recover the essence of painting, painting to enjoy the material and the gesture and to transmit one’s enjoyment.”
XEVI SOLÀ
2022. Oil on canvas. 130 X 326 cm.
