MANUEL SOLANO
Manuel Solano is a Berlin-based Mexican artist whose work focuses on the development of personality, emotions and feelings over a lifetime. Solano’s long-standing interdisciplinary practice was transformed in 2014, when at the age of 26, they lost their eyesight due to a HIV-related illness. Today, Solano uses tactile mapping techniques to apply layers of acrylic directly onto canvas with their fingertips to create images that evoke life’s formative moments as well as those from popular culture. They spoke to TANK about their exhibition The Top of Each Ripple at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), their first solo show at a UK institution.
Interview by Christabel StewartPortrait by Jetmir Idrizi
Christabel Stewart I just watched your 2018 video work Masculina. I loved watching you in the city. Tell me about the work.
Manuel Solano Masculina means “masculine”, but it’s the feminine form of the adjective. If you describe something as masculina it’s understood that you’re talking about something female, but you’re describing it as masculine. Not now, but at different stages of my life, I was told that I was styling myself to look like a lesbian. I feel most comfortable in clothes you could describe as mannish women’s clothes. I love women’s trousers that are like vintage men’s trousers. I love boxy jackets or sleeveless tops that accentuate my shoulders. I had always wanted to make a fashion video with myself in it and the show I had at ICA Miami meant I could.
CS So the backdrop in that work is Miami?
MS Yes. I worked with the director Milcho, who’s Miami-based. She mostly does music videos and comes from TV and advertising, rather than film or art. I’m always really nervous in front of a camera, but we got along really well, and I felt very comfortable with her.
CS What is the soundtrack? It’s very familiar.
MS “Drive” by The Cars. I wanted it to be reminiscent of 1980s music videos or films. I was born in 1987 and in the mid-1990s I started noticing things with style – I would see a photo in a magazine or a movie that I would recognise as stylish. The first things that captured my attention were not maybe so much from the 1990s, but from the late 1980s. That’s probably why, when I think of popular culture, interior design or fashion, my references are late 1980s, early 1990s.
CS There’s a painting of yours with a triangle and circle motif, which evokes 1980s design. Mass-produced posters were a very British-High-Street-thing at that time. There’s the Athena poster of a woman tennis player lifting up her skirt that became iconic. I suppose those kinds of references were something you might see on a record cover or an advertisment.
MS I guess the correct word to describe these things would be tropes? Snippets of visual style that we recognise. The triangles in the painting you mentioned, I didn’t have anything specific in mind. It’s just a style. I have no idea where it’s from but it’s so familiar I must have seen it many times in many different places.
CS Tropes are recycled over and over. And the perception of these eras changes too. To my son the 1980s are prehistoric, as the 1960s were to me, but they’re endlessly available too. The amazing thing about being in the category of “artist”, which-ever version of an artist you identify as, is the freedom that you have, whatever your personal parameters or capabilities, to mine these things.
MS I consider myself extremely lucky to be an artist. When I went to university, I was originally enrolled in the graphic-design department. Going to university was a shock because the college was not in Mexico City, but in Cholula, which is two hours away, and it was my first time living away from home. In Mexico, you don’t move out of your family’s house until the day you marry basically. We’re a close-knit family and they were overly protective. I had been on a course the previous summer where I’d taken painting, but my parents, and everyone around me, convinced me that graphic design was a safer choice than art. After the first class, I went straight to the admissions office and requested to switch to the arts major. I called my mom and told her; she was not pleased, but ultimately she has been very supportive.
CS The incredible painting Dany Jugando con Las Ballenas [2021] that features a young child holding a whale over his face, stood out.
MS Yes, that’s my baby brother, Dany. He had whale and shark toys and when he was playing with them, he would go really slowly like a zombie, looking at them from below. We didn’t know why he was doing that until one day my dad and I saw it on the Discovery Channel. This slow motion shot underwater of a whale swimming across the frame. And we understood that was what he was doing.
CS The biggest piece in the exhibition is Liverpool [2020], an enormous, almost Andreas Gursky-scale image of a shopping centre. Is it a specific or a generic place?
MS It’s a shopping mall called Plaza Satélite in a suburb of Mexico City. I lived in the area, until not so long ago, and growing up, this mall was always present. It was like a comfort zone and made me feel safe, somehow. On one end of the shopping mall, there’s this big department store called Liverpool. It’s a very old department store in Mexico – I think it was founded in the 1800s – and when I was younger was a place in the city where you could buy things from Europe and other places; it’s now the second biggest chain of department stores in Mexico. In the Plaza Satélite, a huge mural used to hang above the entrance, and that inspired the painting. It was this abstracted, stylised sunset, with seagulls flying off. Plaza Satélite was founded in what has always been a middle-class suburb, or rather, lower middle class, but with aspirations. Real estate was more affordable than in other similar suburbs around the city. As soon as people know that I’m from Satélite, they think, “This person thinks they are rich, but they’re not really.” We want to be like other rich people, but we’re not. They go to New York for Christmas holidays; we would go to San Antonio, Texas.
CS The suburbs get a really bad rep.
MS I love Satélite. I’m very proud of my roots.
CS Do you feel that art needs other people to activate it? Once you’ve hung an exhibition, do you leave and say, “Now it’s in the public realm, I can go back to my space”?
MS No, I don’t think I can – I don’t think I can ever leave it at the door. It feels too much like a part of me. Every work that I’ve ever made seems like part of one thing, like one exercise spanning all my life, and I don’t know how I could ever distance myself from it. I feel like I make these things in order to communicate with the world, although it’s not always a conscious decision. I guess in that sense, you could say that it needs other people for it to be complete, but that statement also doesn’t sound true, either, because I feel like the work in itself is already alive in a way. In Dundee, I’m very pleased with the approach that DCA took to give context to the work by looking into my tastes, what books I’ve read, what movies I like. That way the audience can get an idea of my sense of humour, and my taste in music. Which maybe is not referenced directly in all of the works, but it’s part of the iceberg with the works at the tip. By showing the audience the things I like, they can guess what the rest of the iceberg looks like – and that’s very important for me. ◉