An Article by A. V. (901 words, 5 min. read)
Six Artists. Six Voices. One Shared Pulse.
Each artist in this show offers a singular vision — yet together, their works pulse with shared urgency, interiority, and a return to painting as a deeply human act. These are artists who paint with memory, intuition, and introspection. Their gestures are quiet, but they carry weight.
Walking into Fresh Perspectives at Opera Gallery Dubai, one feels immediately the care and harmony with which this exhibition has been assembled. Curator and director Sylvain P. Gaillard has not simply grouped six contemporary artists together — he has orchestrated a dialogue between them, letting each voice resonate in its own tempo while remaining part of a greater emotional cadence.
Xevi Solà — The Stillness Between Thoughts
Xevi Solà’s women do not perform for the viewer. They are occupied — not with tasks, but with being. His paintings feel like windows into suspended time, where the external world quiets, and the inner one hums.
Using thin layers of oil paint on wood panels, Solà builds delicate atmospheres that echo his academic background in philosophy. His figures are often bathed in natural light, frozen mid-thought, surrounded by elegant emptiness. This sparseness isn’t cold — it invites projection. Solà’s work becomes a mirror of presence and absence, of intimacy withheld.
There’s a cinematic quality here, yet no plot — only stillness, introspection, and grace. His practice, grounded in observation and control, gives form to silence.
Adrián Navarro — Architecture of Light
To stand in front of Adrián Navarro’s canvases is to experience spatial disorientation and quiet awe. Trained as an architect, Navarro constructs his compositions with rigor and precision — but their effect is atmospheric rather than rigid.
Using a technique that combines photorealism and abstraction, he overlays geometric grids onto blurred, layered color fields. These are not mere surfaces; they are portals. The eye is drawn inward, into pulsating, weightless space. His work speaks to “transparency, light, gravity, and time” — themes deeply embedded in his practice and background in Madrid, London, and New York.
What Navarro offers is a place to lose — or perhaps find — yourself.
Thomas Dillon — The Weather of Emotion
There is a physicality to Thomas Dillon’s work that makes you want to touch it — not just with your fingers, but with memory. His paintings are densely layered, scraped, textured. They feel like emotional weather systems: brooding, meditative, unresolved.
Dillon, born in Ireland and based in London, builds his canvases through additive and subtractive gestures, letting intuition guide structure. His colors are muted but forceful, his surfaces scuffed and scarred like old walls or ancient landscapes. There is no narrative here — only sensation.
Each work feels like it carries a history, as though emotion has left sediment behind.
Miguel Sainz Ojeda — Between Clarity and Disappearance
Miguel Sainz Ojeda paints people the way we remember them: with edges that soften, details that glow and fade at once. His works are portraits — but not of likeness. They are portraits of transience.
Ojeda’s technique bridges classical realism and dissolution. Working from photographic references, he renders human faces with near-digital precision, only to blur them, partially erase them, or obscure them behind fog-like light. There’s beauty here, but also loss — a haunting softness that speaks of identity not as something fixed, but as something fluid and vanishing.
His paintings ache, quietly.
Gustavo Nazareno — Shadows of the Divine
Nazareno’s work glows from within darkness. Raised in a family of spiritual practitioners in Brazil, his paintings draw from Afro-Brazilian traditions, particularly Candomblé. His figures — dark-skinned, adorned, illuminated by gold — are not just characters, they are presences.
Working with a limited palette of deep black and luminous metallics, Nazareno creates sacred, powerful imagery. His subjects confront the viewer with calm strength and vulnerability. Their stillness is ceremonial. They embody histories — personal, ancestral, spiritual — that transcend paint.
There is reverence here. Each painting is an offering.
Alex Sutcliffe — The Joy of Letting Go
Alex Sutcliffe paints like he’s listening to something only he can hear — and inviting us into its rhythm. His abstract canvases feel improvisational, alive, pulsing with color and freedom. There’s no fear of losing form — only trust in the process.
Drawing inspiration from memory, music, and spontaneous motion, Sutcliffe allows color, shape, and gesture to guide the direction of each painting. The result is a series of vibrant, often playful compositions that feel like motion paused mid-beat.
He doesn’t ask us to interpret. He invites us to feel.
A Curator’s Composition — Sylvain P. Gaillard
What curator and gallery director Sylvain P. Gaillard has done here is more than select six artists. He has choreographed an experience — one that is subtle, paced, and rich with emotional nuance.
He allows these diverse practices to echo off one another: abstraction next to portraiture, stillness beside movement, intimacy held against distance. His approach is quiet but confident — trusting that the viewer will take the time to listen, to reflect, to be moved.
In a region of rapid development and spectacle, Gaillard has created a show that invites slowness, humility, and depth.
In Closing: A Breath Between Worlds
Fresh Perspectives is not just an exhibition — it is a meditative space. Each painting holds you in a different way: some whisper, some vibrate, some confront. But all speak to the persistence of painting as a deeply human act.
In this carefully curated space, time slows. Eyes linger. And something within — perhaps forgotten — stirs gently awake.
