Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

3 hours ago7 min read1 comments

Manuela Solano’s journey into darkness began not with an ending, but a profound recalibration of perception. After losing her sight, the artist faced a void where visual reference once lived, a chasm that would have silenced many.Instead, Solano discovered a new process, one that trades the immediacy of sight for the profound, mutable terrain of memory. 'I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,' she reflects, her statement echoing through the quiet studio where she now works.'This means everybody faces the problem of remembering. ' This simple, universal truth became the foundation of her new artistic language.Where she once relied on her eyes, she now relies on touch, on the residual imprints of faces and forms held in her mind, and on the collaborative guidance of assistants who help translate her mental compositions onto the canvas. Her portraits are no longer mere representations; they are conversations with the past, layered with the emotional residue of each recollection.They are palimpsests of feeling, where the initial memory of a subject’s face is overlaid with the subsequent emotions of loss, adaptation, and rediscovery. This process mirrors the very nature of human consciousness, where our past is not a fixed recording but a narrative we continually edit and refine.In a world obsessed with the hyper-real and the visually perfect, Solano’s work is a powerful testament to the authenticity of the internal. Her story is not just one of artistic adaptation, but a deeply human one about resilience.It asks us to consider what we truly see when we look at someone, and what remains when the physical sight is gone. Her paintings, born from the convergence of memory and the novelty of a new tactile world, challenge the very definition of observation, suggesting that the most vivid portraits are perhaps those painted not with light, but with the mind’s enduring eye.

#featured

#Manuela Solano

#painting

#blindness

#memory

#art process

#visual arts

#portrait

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