Emilio Gola’s painterly practice is one that happened by itself. Bodies tangle, mingle, and melt together in a search for balance, taking on informal, disorderly poses in a continuous exchange of roles. Life drawing is the paradigm within his paintings, managing to capture all the freedom given to the models whilst they pose. By letting others play, with only the intrusion of the artist’s eye drawing on the canvas, the scenes come to life amidst the precious contrasts between playing and boredom. 

Emilio Gola's work always starts from a base of drawing live models in the studio. Only after this phase of drawing force lines and creating the composition is the painting material applied. The bodies of his friends create temporary constellations that are constantly reformulating and searching for an equilibrium or gravitational centre. Sometimes the figure is single, without this ever resulting in portraiture. The point of view is always anomalous, almost elevated, and his characters are generally depicted upturned or upside down. It is a youthful world that seems to originate straight out of an album by some Britpop group from a few years ago, carrying a touch of nostalgia and something melancholic.

The canvases are populated with a trove of objects - books (lots of them), candies, flowers, pencils, fortune cookies - that become fundamental pictorial material, just as the fabrics become abstract or decorative patterns in the midst of which the figures pose. The small paintings, on the other hand, frequently focus on details where shoes often take center stage, an object towards which Gola seems to have a predilection.