Manuel Solano is remembering trying to paint for the first time after going blind. “I thought it was a joke: I thought it was over for me, as a painter.”
Their work from that period is harsh and urgent, clawed on to the canvas in jangling colour. Solano named the series Blind Transgender with Aids: a bitter joke reflecting their conviction that the work would attract attention only as a curiosity. “These stupid, ugly paintings … it was like giving the finger to the visual, fully abled world.”
Born in Mexico City, now based in Berlin, Solano was 26 when they lost their sight to an HIV-related illness that left their already slight body scarred. Their earlier work was cool and precise: paintings of glacial, otherworldly interiors, and performances that played on their androgynous beauty. A new exhibition, The Top of Each Ripple, at Dundee Contemporary Arts offers a recent overview. The furious Blind Transgender with Aids series has given way to atmospheric paintings evoking episodes from Solano’s memory: a woman with heavy bangles dropping her car keys on a glass-topped hall table; the mural above a mall entrance; an infant playing with plastic whale toys by the TV.
It took time for Solano to develop a way to work again. Losing their sight was one hurdle: losing independence another: “I was very much a loner before I became blind. One of the toughest lessons has been having to rely on other people and accept that I need help in some situations.” Solano worked with close friends and family: an ex-partner now runs their studio with three production assistants (“a group of very talented painters in their own right”). They have developed a method of mapping each working canvas into sections using nails, wire and pipe-cleaners, around which Solano navigates by touch.
DCA has programmed a season of music, readings and films linked to Solano’s work. One surprise inclusion is Jurassic Park. A dino nerd as a kid, Solano now sees the positioning of dinosaurs in pop culture as symptomatic of the weird way preconceptions around gender identity manifest (indeed, this will be the subject of a new body of work to be shown at London’s Carlos/Ishikawa gallery later this year).
The link between dinosaurs and birds has been known for years, explains Solano, yet they are seldom pictured with feathers: “A lot of the values associated with birds are, in human terms, associated with femininity: they’re fragile, they’re graceful, they’re flamboyant.” It is for this reason, the artist suggests, that dinosaurs remain lizard-like in the popular imagination: we have come to identify them with masculine character traits.
Illness came just as Solano was starting to explore their own gender identity. For a performance in 2012, they recreated Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous pope-ripping appearance on Saturday Night Live. Shaving their head for the performance, thought Solano, was “going to be the moment I went from being a very feminine boy to a more masculine grown man like my dad.” Instead, they felt intensely uncomfortable, “I would say even suicidal for a time: I hated looking at myself in the mirror.”
Solano soon realised they did not want to become that grown man: that they were becoming a different person. “My brother put it very eloquently. He said that I looked like a woman who was trying to look like a man. That felt very on point.” A fascination with “masculine” women – Robin Wright, Michelle Obama – emerges in Solano’s paintings of pop culture icons. In the video work Masculina, the artist appears as though in a fashion shoot or music video, dressed in revealing 1980s-inspired silhouettes that billow seductively in the breeze.
I suggest Masculina defies taboos attached to the ill body. “I wanted the audience to see that it’s not an ill body,” Solana gently corrects me. “It’s a body that went through illness, and past it. A lot of people forget that. I have to constantly remind myself that I am healthy and beautiful.”
After moving to Berlin in 2019 they found themselves seduced by the city’s liberated body culture; its naked swimming and saunas. “Years ago, I would have been completely terrified to do this, being covered in scars,” Solano admits, but now “I have discovered almost a passion for being in a group where everybody is naked. With time, I’ve learned to not think about my scars any more. A lot of people seem to not even notice them.”