Los Abuelos

2020 - Painting (Painting)

142 x 170 cm

Manuel Solano

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Since Manuel Solano became blind, they developed a technique that relies on audio descriptions that allow for an assistant to place pins and threads on a grid that guides the artist’s hands through the surface. In Los Abuelos , the artist works with a canvas the size of their body, allowing intense interaction with the wet paint. This kind of tactility creates a complex entanglement of color masses alternating sharp and blurred details, giving the image an erratic and affective atmosphere just as our fond memories often appear to us. The painting takes us back to Solano’s early childhood in Mexico, in the late 80s. This compelling domestic scene also reveals the country’s unequal and patriarchal social structure, which is nevertheless projected on that little boy. Nowadays, according to the artist, their memory is archival and visual, being their sole source of imagery: “even to this day I can walk into a room and remember what it looked like, or I can listen to a movie, and remember what it looked like. I remember so many details from so many things I saw and they’re going to be with me for the rest of my life. It’s a blessing and a curse at the same time”. Through their striking visuality, Solano reminds us that what constitutes us is a combination of our interactions with the images we come across and to which we are subject to. By delving into this highly personal repertoire, we can analyze and deprogram involuntarily inherited social structures and power relations; the binary gender division itself.

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Manuel Solano, who is non-binary and prefers plural pronouns, was an emerging 26-year-old artist when they lost their sight to an HIV-related infection in 2013. Unwilling to be hindered by their condition and urged on by their friends, Solano returned to work. But rather than the experimental art of their earlier years, they began anew with a series of expressive portraits and word paintings, titled “Blind Transgender with AIDS”. Working almost exclusively with paint on either canvas or paper, mining their memories of pop culture and past times while applying the paint with their hands, Solano created an impressive body of work. Because Solano draws from memories, the pop stars and formidable female figures they select for commemoration are an autobiographical pantheon of the painter’s formative influences. While Solano transcends fixed gender in their personal identity, their work has the electric energy that drag generates from the friction between exaggerated gender stereotypes.

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Colors:

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• identity.n.01
• familial.a.01
• body.n.01
• memory.n.01
• domestic.a.02