Hug

"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