LOS ANGELES, CA.- François Ghebaly presents Pain of Others, an exhibition of new paintings by Xie Lei. The exhibition marks the artist’s debut solo presentation with the gallery and his first in Los Angeles, opening in Beverly Hills at 415 N Camden Dr.
Pain of Others continues French-Chinese artist Xie Lei’s investigation into the possibilities of representing our most elemental emotional states. The artist’s paintings develop from meticulously-applied layers of oil paint that give his surfaces a breathlike shimmer, in a palette of phosphorescent blues, Sèvres greens, or warm ochres that provide a blanketed, nocturnal quality to his scenes. The indeterminate spaces of his paintings are lit almost entirely by figures which possess a luminosity that radiates from the deepest underlayers of their forms. Inflamed by this seeming inner light, Xie’s subjects are human silhouettes stripped of their identifying features so that their essential forms achieve a near archetypal expression.
Xie’s newest exhibition comprises twelve paintings at both large and intimate scales, each remarkable for the broad emotional resonances captured—identifying and ambiguating in equal measure. The exhibition’s title, “Pain of Others,” is intentionally expansive, referring to the pain of desire, acute longing, envy, and heartbreak, as well as to Susan Sontag’s landmark 2003 text on the difficulty and necessity of bearing witness to images of suffering. Suspended between resolution and dissolution, Xie’s paintings allow these multiple meanings to proliferate.
Xie dramatizes this suspension of meaning through images in which his spectral figures hold one another in poses that read equally as embrace and struggle. Compositions are drawn from the artist’s mental archive of images glimpsed in films, poetry, literature, and painting. Two of the larger works on view, Influence (After Carracci), 2026, and Dominance (After Spada), 2026, find inspiration in Italian Baroque painting, a longtime influence on the artist. Beyond their compositional reference points, the images’ striking, enigmatic emotional atmospheres call into question easy divisions between eros and anger, support and subjugation. Locked in each other’s grasps, Xie’s figures simultaneously threaten to and are forbidden from dissolving into one another, telegraphing the tenuous boundaries of self.
Xie Lei (b. 1983, Huainan, China) has lived and worked in Paris since 2006. He graduated from the CAFA in Beijing then the ENSBA in Paris. He is the recipient of the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize. His works have been exhibited in numerous institutions including Musée Denys-Puech, Rodez, France; Musée d’art Moderne, Paris; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Bibliothèque nationale de France; The Warehouse, Dallas; MO.CO, Montpellier; CAPC, Bordeaux; Villa Noailles, Hyères; Collection Lambert, Avignon; MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine; Langen Foundation, Neuss; Musée National d’Histoire d’Immigration, Paris; Ricard Foundation, Paris. His work is held in many institutional collections such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, MAC VAL, Albertina Museum, Frac des Pays de la Loire, MARKK and X Museum. Xie was resident at the Casa de Velázquez, Madrid and at the Villa Medici, Roma.
