The Brooklyn Rail

It is the project of a lifetime. When he was young, Spanish photographer Miguel Soler-Roig would often visit his grandfather, the noted physician Dr. José Soler-Roig (1902–99), who was full of stories about the celebrated people he knew. He had been Pablo Picasso’s personal physician, as well as physician to Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí. In his social circles he counted many in the arts and letters. His grandson resolved to honor his legacy through his own art practice.

On view at the Barbara Davis Gallery, Soler-Roig showed the first part of a series he has been working on for the last twenty years. It’s not only any homage to his grandfather, but to an earlier—perhaps more gracious—era. The work is comprised of a series of black-and-white photographic portraits of contemporary sitters, wearing the dress and striking the pose of famous people from the twentieth century. 

There’s one of “Tamara de Lempicka” re-enacting her painting of herself behind the wheel of a sports car, My Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) from 1929. She looks quite pleased, if a little bored. In another, we see “Françoise Gilot” and “Picasso” as he walks behind her, while holding a parasol to shade her on the beach.  In Truman Capote (2026), the famous author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s sits dapper in a tipped fedora. There is even a selfie of Soler-Roig on his way to a costume party in Venice, eyes wide open and wearing an upturned moustache. Even though the photographer claims it was spur of the moment, he managed to look very much like the man he was dressed up as: Salvador Dalí.  

In the entry area of the Davis Gallery, there was a chart Soler-Roig created to map out how the different “characters,” as he calls them, were connected to his grandfather, whose name is at the center. There are some 250 names here, and he plans to capture them all!

Soler-Roig, who lives in Madrid, has worked on many different projects since completing his master’s degree in photography sixteen years ago. Much of his work is conceptual, although, like his grandfather, he takes photographs when he travels and has a series, for example, on the Marfa Lights. He started thinking about this current project about the time he finished his studies.   

After he returned to Spain, I caught up with him via telephone.  “I remember when I was a child going to his house on the weekends for lunch,” he says of his grandfather.  “I wanted to do something that related to my personal life and the life of my grandfather, who was a famous surgeon in Barcelona,” he says. “He was an amateur photographer, and he was photographing all his trips in different parts of the world and meeting people. He made numerous photographs, and I was looking at them every time I went for lunch there.”  It was magical for the child to see the world through these pictures.

Soler-Roig’s goal is to produce about 250 portraits—he is up to about one hundred. When I met him in Houston, he was planning to shoot another seventeen or so with those he knew there or had been introduced to him. Generally, most of the sitters are people he knows or has been introduced to, and he lets them choose among the characters he wants to portray, although sometimes he has an idea. They have to come dressed for the part—the man who modeled as Andy Warhol came with wig and makeup—and sometimes there are furnishings and props that add to the mise en scène.

Although it took awhile for the project to launch, he feels he’s on a roll and will finish in another year or so. He’s also researching the “characters” as he goes along, and puts together a short biography for each portrait. His grandfather lived during “those times from the beginning of the 1900s when modern art developed, having met some of the artists in Spain, in Paris, in London, and in Germany,” he says. “He lived through two wars, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. For me, it’s amazing what he went through, and I’m going to try to document that by visuals.”