XEVI SOLÁ

The artworks at the show continue to pursue Xevi’s latest artistic proposal, building a more minimal yet powerful approach to the art of portraiture. Presenting daring and enigmatic characters over a plain filled with colour background, Solà makes us concentrate on the ‘personality’ of the portrayed, almost showing with that colour the thoughts and feelings of the character; making the onlooker feel them as well, as a sort of mes- sage, as a sort of spell.

The latest incorporation of messages into the artist’s work shows how he is slowly but surely evolving into a more conceptual approach, away from his pictorial baroquism, bringing him a step closer into the consolidation of the new way he is approaching painting: a New Minimalism where less is definitely more and that is quickly positioning him as one of the top figures in Contemporary Spanish Figurative Art.

For this exhibition I wanted to gather a series of works under the title To be. Not in all of them, but in some of the pieces there is a message that seems to be addressed to the viewer, but in reality it is addressed to myself and it has to do with the creative process: ‘be dare’, ‘be faster’, etc. I was drawn to the idea that the reader of the text could be the character represented in the work, or the viewer or even myself and that, therefore, it could take on different meanings.

On the other hand, I have always been interested in the text incorporated into the painting, mixing the pictorial with the literary, but in a minimalist way, which is also where I want to direct my work. And what could be more literary and concentrated than the well-known ‘to be or not to be’.

All the philosophy contained in Hamlet’s soliloquy that I would like to enclose in any of my works. And continuing with philosophy, the title also alludes to the ontological opposition ‘to be–to exist’. In these works I tried to capture the interior, the essence of some characters. Nothing new in fact, but what the tradition of portrait has always historically aimed for Xevi Solà Serra’s words on the exhibition September 2022