Shopping malls and swimming pools

Do you remember when your parents used to take you to the mall as a kid? How everything inside looked bright, colorful and magical? Do you remember spending the day at the community pool with your family, playing with your toys in the water? Do you remember the colors, the sounds, the smells? If you do, if you share this experience, this collective memory of sorts, you were probably born in the eighties to a middle class family, for whom leisure and consumption were social activities and a sign of status within one’s own community.  

Manuel Solano was indeed born in the eighties, in 1987 to be exact. They grew up in Ciudad Satélite, a Greater Mexico City upper middle class suburban neighborhood founded in the mid 1950s, as a city outside the city.  Probably the most well known landmark of the neighborhood is  Torres de Satélite (Satellite Towers), a monumental public sculpture created by renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán and sculptor Mathias Goeritz. The collaboration between architect and artist is now iconic, with its five triangular prisms inhabiting a square that is limited on its sides by the main avenue that gives access to the area. It is both landmark, monument and emotional architecture. The Torres de Satélite testify the rise of a modern and cosmopolitan social class, for whom affect is inextricably tied to how the the surrounding urban landscape is designed, lived and remembered.

If Torres de Satélite marks the beginning of the development of the bond between architecture and décor on one hand, with affect and personality on the other, then Heliplaza is its apex. A shopping mall built in Ciudad Satélite in the 1980’s, five kilometers away from Torres de Satélite, Heliplaza’s design preyed on the tropes of awe inspiring modern architecture, by referencing the helicoidal structure of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, while exploring the cultural relativism and the dilettante mindset of Post Modern aesthetics and design. Shiny panoramic elevators from which one could see and be seen, an endlessly spiraling path upwards, dramatic water features, translucent glass block walls, indoor terraces where one could sit and enjoy a soda drink and plenty of natural light coming from the dome-like skylight brought together consumerism and leisure together in a previously unseen way. 

The circularity and infinity of the mall’s logo mesmerized young Manuel Solano as they visited with their family. But the image that is etched deeply into the artist’s mind is not that of Heliplaza’s logo, but of the massive tile mural placed above the entrance of the Liverpool department store in the Plaza Satélite shopping mall, depicting a stylized flock of birds taking flight. Solano remembers looking at the monumental birds flying away towards an uncertain destination, in all their avian glory, and understanding for the first time how perspective operates in a two dimensional surface. Their young mind had achieved something extremely important that very moment and they were thrilled by it.

Despite important, memories of shopping malls aren’t the only ones Solano recalls for this exhibition. Leisure and décor, as signifiers of both a specific period of time, Solano’s childhood, and of a mental landscape, or a personality, also materialize through the memories of lazy Summer days spent at the community pool, lounging in stylish, fiberglass pool chairs or playing by the shallow kids pool with a dinosaur, always surrounded by a dark, saturated Forest Green color, commonly used to decorate the walls of these communal recreational facilities.The memory is vivid and we can feel it, in its 90’s VHS color palette splendor.

Speaking of VHS, let us fast forward this narrative to 2013. By then Manuel Solano was an emerging, 26-year-old artist when they lost their eyesight to an HIV-related infection. Unwilling to be hindered by their condition and urged on by their friends, Solano returned to making work. But rather than the experimental art of their earlier years, they began anew with a series of expressive portraits. Their memory became the source material for a universe ripe with visual references to both pop culture and past experiences. Over the years, Solano’s paintings, which they create by applying paint to the canvas directly with their own hands, have developed into an impressive body of work which tells us of pop stars, Hollywood actresses and formidable female figures as an autobiographical pantheon of the painter’s formative influences. In Heliplaza, and for the first time, these larger that life female figures are replaced by décor and architecture. A direct response to and dialogue with the architecture of the exhibition space, the iconic Copan building, visual memories of glass blocks, laminate or formica surfaces, copper hues and lush indoor house plants, of shopping malls and food courts, of swimming pools and futuristic lounge chairs, now constitute a lexicon from which personality, and the self, can be distilled.