Memories merge with novelty for Manuela Solano, who adopted a new craft after losing her sight — Colossal
Precisely placed nails, tape and pipe cleaners provide guidance when Manuela Solano contours her cheekbones or sculpts the chiseled torso of a cowboy. The blind artist works intuitively, feeling out the areas she and her team have marked and trusting that together, the desired image will emerge. “I try to force myself to keep [the shapes] It’s faster, looser and feels great,” she adds, “which makes the process more fun. “
Solano, 26, lost his sight due to a medical error during HIV treatment. She has since adapted to new ways of working, using her memory and imagination to create paintings that reflect her worries and joys. “My work is always, in a way, about myself. My work is either my taste, my desires, or how I see myself in other people,” she says.
A beautiful film by Barbara Anastacio T MagazineThe work was produced before the artist’s gender transition in 2018, following a visit to Solano’s then-Mexico City studio and a detailed look at her creative process. We see the artist looking through works from before she lost her sight in 2014, tracing her creative practice from art school to the present.
Snowy landscapes and portraits appear throughout the sketchbook, providing a visual thread that informs her work today. More recent paintings, such as “Walking on Water,” preserve the vast landscapes of ripples across the sea from her earlier works. “My team and I are constantly looking for the best way to paint textures or effects that we’ve never painted before. In this way, we’re constantly learning,” she adds.
Likewise, her solo exhibition includes a series of self-portraits autogenesisAn exhibition held in Madrid earlier this year reflected on the complex evolution of identity through a variety of tender portraits. Gender is fluid in this work, and the connection between humans and nature is intrinsic, as parts of the environment seem to imprint themselves on her figures.
While Solano did draw from memory, she is quick to clarify that the process is not unique to her. “I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,” she said. “This means that everyone faces the problem of remembering things differently than they actually look.”
Solano, who recently moved to Berlin, incorporates a part of her daily life into much of her practice, allowing her ongoing experiences and dreams to be combined with images from the past to create new works. She explained:
Today I’m doing a lot of work on my current comings and goings, all of which are things I’ve obviously never seen before. I think there’s a common misconception that my work might be about memory, that I’m painting what I see. This is often accompanied by a rather ableist fear that one day I might run out of memory to paint. But that’s not the case. I’m always creating new images and putting them into my work.
Solano was also a writer, often writing poems and stories to accompany her paintings. A recent piece, which she calls a manifesto, will accompany her new body of work Blind transsexual and wild series. If you’re in Mexico City, you can enjoy the artist’s pop culture work at the Tamayo Museum until January 4, before the exhibition moves to CAAC Seville in 2026. Check out more of her work on Instagram.
