Després del somni (After the Dream): Nil Masip Boget (2025)

It makes you sick, doesn’t it?

Here’s someone who is only twenty years old, extremely good looking — and, annoyingly, an amazing artist too.

Barcelona-based Nil Masip Boget is a classical and figurative painter who trained at the Barcelona Academy of Art and Acadèmia La Gràcia. He has already won several awards, and his work is now held in public and private collections across Europe and the USA. He has also just had his first solo exhibition, sense por d’oblidar, at Inéditad Gallery in Barcelona.

He works mainly in oils, using light, colour and texture to create paintings that feel quiet and introspective. There is often a sense of silence in his work — moments caught somewhere between thought, memory and dream.

Després del somni (After the Dream) was the last oil painting he completed for Happiness Journey, a contemporary art exhibition held in Barcelona last year.

It shows a shirtless young man sitting on a bed, wrapped in crumpled white sheets. He looks away from us, towards the right of the canvas, while a mirror on the far left gives us a second, more distant view of him.

It is a beautifully strange composition. The dark background seems to remove the outside world altogether, leaving the boy suspended in some private, timeless space between sleep and waking. The mirror adds another layer — self-reflection, vulnerability, perhaps even the feeling of watching yourself from outside your own body.

Enough of the art criticism.

What actually caught my eye about this painting?

I shall leave you to guess.