Opera Gallery is pleased to present Endless sun-days, a brand-new, multifaceted body of work comprised of 15 canvases. This is Xevi Solà’s first solo exhibition in New York.

“If I had to define this series, I would say it’s a kind of collective psychological portrait. These figures are trying to relax in a bright and colorful environment, but gray clouds lurk behind their sunglasses,” Solà said of the body of work, adding, “As a child, I was very much a homebody, and my source of inspiration for landscapes was cinema.”

Influenced by fashion photography, film stills, and mugshots, Solà creates portraits with a cinematic dimension and suggestive storytelling. In Dimanche 1, 2025, four figures sit by a pool, lost in silent contemplation, time seemingly suspended. While echoes of David Hockney’s iconic pool scenes can be perceived, Solà’s incisive, contemporary, and psychologically charged approach lends this moment a unique authenticity.

One can cite, for example, the glamour and tension of Mid-century French Riviera cinema, which Solà’s paintings evoke, particularly the psychological atmosphere of the 1969 film La piscine (The swimming pool), in which Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin grapple with latent desire and jealousy during a summer in the South of France. The leisurely ideal and mid-20th-century elegance of Slim Aarons’s Poolside gossip series find a similar resonance in Solà’s compositions, which are both familiar and dreamlike.

Working from spontaneous, single-stroke sketches, Solà paints quickly to preserve the immediacy and spontaneity of his creative process, thus placing his practice in the lineage of contemporary figurative painters such as Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, Alex Katz, Chantal Joffe, and Elizabeth Peyton. Presented together, the works in Endless sun-days read like an intimate, colorful, and cinematic visual diary. Viewers are invited to enter Solà’s suspended summer world and imagine the stories unfolding just beyond the frame.