Xevi Solà deconstructs art to recover the pleasure of painting and transmit it to the public. The result are paintings full of colors but apparently incomplete. People playing with the opposites that embody a strong tension even in stillness. Zara was fascinated by such peculiar style and decided to homage Solà with a small capsule collection. Basic urban style pieces populated by the painter’s female characters in bright colors.
Narrative gives way to form
Xevi Solà is a Spanish painter born in 1969, who portrays both people and landscapes. His paintings are the result of a decomposition process for aesthetic purpose. At a certain point of his career, Solà decides to remove his characters from their settings and portray them separately. Therefore, his characters appear out of time and space, while his landscapes seem empty and inanimate. With such choice the artists abandons art’s traditional narrative function to seize the moment, the detail. We can here grasp the influence of his background as a photographer.
Therefore, he aims not at telling a story, but at capturing on canvas the artistic gesture, the stroke of color, a rapid and spontaneous movement. Xevi Solà deconstructs art not to destroy it, but to guarantee its survival. He takes it back to its embryonic stage of movement and color free of schemes, of enjoyment.
Xevi Solà’s characters
Even though preferring form over content, Xevi Solà’s paintings are not flat nor meaningless. Especially when portraying human figures. His characters are static, they seem to do nothing, but a tension exudes from their eyes and expressions. As though they were about to act and to do it in a strange way. Indeed, Solà chooses to portray humanity through weird and absurd characters, often characterised by strong dichotomies. A style probably influenced by his previous experience as a nurse in a psychiatric asylum.
And actually Solà’s characters seem to reflect Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud’s theories on the subconscious. Or a movie script by Alfred Hitchcock, who once said: “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms”.
