There is something unsettling about Xevi Solà’s sun-drenched paintings — and that’s exactly the point.
The Spanish painter, who lives and works in Girona, Catalonia, has spent recent years developing a body of work that looks, at first glance, like a celebration of leisure. Figures lounge poolside. Colors are brilliant. The sun is always shining. But look closer, and something else is there. “These figures are trying to relax in a bright and colorful environment,” Solà says, “but gray clouds lurk behind their sunglasses.”
Xevi Solà, “Dimanche 4,” 2025, oil on canvas, 51.2 x 63.8 in
That tension — between surface pleasure and psychological unease — is the engine driving his Endless Sun-Days series, which Solà describes as “a kind of collective psychological portrait.” The works are lush and cinematic, saturated with the colors of a Mediterranean summer, and yet each painting carries a charge of something unspoken. Figures sit in silent contemplation. Time feels suspended. The stories unfolding just beyond the frame are yours to imagine.
Xevi Solà, “Dimanche 1,” 2025, oil on canvas, 51.2 x 63.8 in.
The cinematic quality is no accident. Solà grew up a self-described homebody, drawing his sense of landscape not from travel but from film. His references are telling: the glamour and psychological tension of mid-century French Riviera cinema, particularly the 1969 film La Piscine, in which four figures navigate latent desire and jealousy during a summer in the South of France. The sun-bleached elegance of photographer Slim Aarons. The cool, charged compositions of David Hockney’s iconic pool paintings. Fashion photography. Mugshots. Film stills. Solà absorbs all of it and turns it into something unmistakably his own.
Xevi Solà, “Dimanche 3,” 2025, oil on canvas, 51.2 x 63.8 in.
His process matches his vision. Working from spontaneous, single-stroke sketches, he paints quickly — preserving the immediacy and rawness of the first idea before second-guessing can set in. It places him in a lineage of painters — Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chantal Joffe, Elizabeth Peyton — for whom urgency and directness are as much a part of the work as color or composition.
Xevi Solà, “Bro,” 2025, oil on canvas, 45.7 x 35 in.
Solà graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona in 2007 and has since exhibited widely across Europe, the United States, and Asia, with solo shows at the Cuperior Collection and YIRI ARTS in Taipei, Alzueta Gallery in Barcelona, and most recently at Opera Gallery in New York City.
Xevi Solà in his studio in Girona, Spain, 2025. ©Enrique Palacio
His Endless Sun-Days paintings invite you into a suspended summer world — gorgeous, slightly uneasy, and impossible to look away from. The sun is bright. The clouds are coming. And the figures behind the sunglasses aren’t telling you a thing.
