“I paint so I never die”

Born in 1985 in Abarán, Murcia, small town at the entrance to the Valle de Ricote, where the Arab-Spanish lineage and culture remained after the Muslim expulsion, the Spanish artist Bran Sólo defines himself as “a good person, painter, illustrator, designer, photographer and sometimes writer, in addition to many other things I never wanted to be“.

Graduated in 2006 as a Computer Applications Developer and Database Analyst, he worked for seven years in the public and private technology sector.

In 2010 he participated in the official program of parallel events of the European biennial of contemporary art Manifesta, in its eighth edition, with an exhibition at the Casas Consistoriales space in Mazarrón, Murcia.

In 2012 he decided to quit his job to devote himself fully to drawing and enrolled in the School of Art of Murcia, leaving behind family, partner and home and moved alone to a studio in the city of Murcia.

During this period (2012-2014) he coincides and learns from teachers such as Pedro Ayala Martí and Pepe Cuervo, and shares training with colleagues such as Daniel El Dibujo.

It is at the same school where he discovers that an eye disease has conditioned his perception since childhood. A macular lesion, formed by scars in the central area of the retina, distorts images in a way he describes as “kaleidoscopic“, multiplying images with high contrast or luminosity with sharpness. In this way, he discovers that he cannot find with certainty the line that separates a light plane from a dark one, he confuses volume with emptiness, positive with negative and, except in specific lighting circumstances, he perceives all objects multiplied by up to eight or ten copies, especially those that are luminous, making it difficult to see screens and projections as well as elements that emit or reflect light. This condition, which forces the brain to interpret reality very subjectively, gives him a “unique vision” which, he says humorously, “is the most important quality an artist must have“.

Growing up and learning to interpret reality with a central serous retinopathy, in addition to a high degree of visual difficulty due to cataracts, makes him grow with different parameters, not being able to distinguish faces easily, for example, or perceive his environment in a stable and regulated way.

In 2014 he finished his studies and graduated in Plastic Arts and Design in Illustration, presenting in his final project the Tarot of Laguna, for which he was qualified with the highest score of the court that granted him an Erasmus scholarship that took him to Oporto.

After his stay in the Portuguese city, with the help of Inés Oliveira and in the company of Daniel El Dibujo, already an inseparable companion, both moved to Madrid where he officially began his artistic career.

In Madrid he exhibited in small halls and entertainment venues, organized events and group exhibitions and gave handicraft workshops with which he became known.

After a year, Bran decides to move in 2015 to Barcelona where he continues his work in an environment that for him was more welcoming, warm and Mediterranean.

In the same year he inaugurates his first solo exhibition: “Perfume de flor de cuchillo“, in Kipfer&Lover, Malaga, which is sold out in a few days.

From that moment on, his career advanced exponentially and in a short time he was able to show his work at the Museo Carmen Thyssen in Malaga, at the ESTAMPA fair in Madrid, at the FLECHA fair in the same city, as well as in other spaces such as Échale Guindas, Matraca Gallery, VillaPuchero Factory, Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo, Swinton & Grant, The Folio Club, Nigredo Espacio, Cutto Espacio Cultural, LA FEDERICA, Canal Gallery, Patrick Bartoli in Marseille, Afnakafna gallery and Freeda gallery in Rome. Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, El Gallinero, Vergel Espacio, or the Gaythering Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.

He also collaborates with publishers exhibiting his work in serialized edition at the MACBA and CCCB in Barcelona, CAIXA Forum Madrid and the Centre Pompidou in Malaga, as well as at the ARCO 2018 Art Fair (Llibreria Laie booth) and thus manages to gain a foothold in specialized stores and art galleries inside and outside Spain.

He returns to Murcia in 2016, looking for the home he longs for impossible, and settles first in the small town of Ceutí, in a house-workshop given to him by his former teacher, Pedro Ayala, enabling the continuity of his career as an artist.

In 2018 she edits for sale the Tarot de Laguna, a work of research and personal development based on the foundations of psychoanalysis and which is currently in its third edition.

Later (2022), when his work as an artist is already internationally recognized, he moves to the surroundings of the Mar Menor, the saltwater lagoon of his childhood summers, where he currently resides.

It is in this year when he undergoes two operations to implant two artificial lenses that replace his ocular lens, allowing him to perceive colors and details never seen before.

“It’s ridiculous and mundane but in those days I discovered that the most beautiful color of all is the blue of the cooking gas burning bright and clean. Before that for me blue was what for you was green, or the sea, which was a continuous blob with no details, now it had sparkles, reflections, movement in the distance“.

This reaffirms his obsession with the sea and its color, and enhances his vision to some degree.

However, perhaps because he developed in his childhood with this characteristic, the ability to distinguish people or contrasts between positive and negative (the sky and the ground, for example), does not improve and turns out to be part of an acquired cognitive condition that is always with him.

Now, and every year since 2017 he holds exhibitions at the Gaythering Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, on the occasion of ARTBASEL MIAMI art week, as well as at LGBT PRIDE in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as part of an agenda of fairs for the visibility of QUEER artists held in the U.S. under the management of Cuban-American artist Alexander Guerra.

He is currently working in his studio and researching the relationship between science and art, which he says “are inseparable to me“, as well as being interested in the graphic study of themes such as frustrated masculinity, fear and human emotions, love, heartbreak and blindness. 

Subjects in Bran Sólo’s work

The protagonists are usually characters of his environment and models that he usually photographs in his studio, predominating in all of them, almost always men, a melancholic, pessimistic and lonely character, being this the main theme that he deals with in most of his works.

Bran Sólo is in love with the sea, linking his color palette to the Mediterranean.

He usually replaces the shape and color of the human body with a blue color like the sea, on backgrounds reminiscent of the fine sand of some of the Mediterranean places in which he is inspired.

The New Masculinities / Cry like a man.

In many of Bran Sólo‘s works, the man is only represented as he is traditionally understood, with a strong, big body, with a determined, courageous look; a man full of security and confidence, impassive, without feelings, without weaknesses, able to protect, to fight, to fend for himself even if he is wounded and even to death… and all that without complaining.

These men in oil or graffiti often appear lonely, sad, fearful and fragile. From them sprouts a delicate reddish plant (Tradescantia or Man’s Love), which is a way of drawing feelings, like coming out of a crack in a rock, which is a wound in a broken-hearted chest. These men have had to learn to accept their fragility, their humanity, and suffer in their struggle to be what they think they should be, against what they really are. Men don’t cry, but in Bran’s play, men cry like men.

Contemporary sadness

The idea, based in part on the essay by Belgian philosopher and art historian Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaer entitled Contemporary sadness: essay on the great moral and intellectual currents of the 19th century, inspires Bran to work on the feeling of loneliness, of feeling different, excluded and rejected in a pessimistic, exhausted environment, where faith in humanity, and consequently, in oneself, has been lost.

“To doubt, not the existence of God, but the presence of a divine virtue in human acts, is the highest form of contemporary sadness.” (Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaer)

The 2017 Ansak series of illustrations reflects this pessimistic character through its inexpressive, slightly melancholic, dark portraits of faces that although they have been deformed by the portrayed character’s own emotions, do not fail to convey the forgotten beauty behind the sorrow and fear that seems to drown the model.

Loneliness

The theme that most concerns the painter is loneliness, which is even reflected in his name after an “ó” with a tilde (that of “Sólo”) that is more reminiscent in spanish of an adverb of quantity than an adjective of company.

“It is not loneliness in the realm of dependence on others, but refers to the feeling of inability to find home, to return home, or to connect with other people. Feeling strange to oneself even without comparing oneself to anyone else.

The loneliness of feeling overwhelmed by the brutal scenery that existence, majestic and perverse, gives us and steals from us”.

It is possible that the visual circumstance that characterizes Bran Sólo‘s personality aggravates this feeling of loneliness, drawing a ghostly and hostile world, empty of humanity, full of shadows.

Dis-love

Precisely this characteristic in Bran’s visual capacity, which turns anyone who moves more than a few centimeters away into a shadow, reaffirms the painter’s need for the physical, for touch as a substitute for vision (hence symbols such as the hand with an eye in the palm), and for the value of company and the exchange of experiences and emotions.

Affection, admiration, connection, protection and commitment are recurring themes and inspirational motifs for the symbolism that appears in his works.

Nudity as an element of sincerity

The characters in Bran’s work are usually unclothed.

This is an expressive resource that the artist considers essential when it comes to talk about emotions, to sincerely express a model, to transmit in a direct way the experience of another person to the eyes of the spectator.

Clothes hide, distort, lie.

The intention is not erotic, much less sexual. In fact, very few of the author’s works deal with sexuality or genitality, contrary to the opinions that usually remain on the surface and label Bran Sólo as an erotic artist.

There are no clothes because there can be no social, temporal or mundane context in a work of pure emotional expression.

The sadness, the lack of love or the infinite loneliness of the portrayed character would dissolve in a sea of folds, of cloudy information, which would cover the person and add an annoying layer of noise that would talk about his time or his social and economic context, and would make him land from a symbolic and divine plane to a scenario full of gravity, thirst, indecision, deception.

The human being in its essence. A thought or an emotion directly from one being to another. That is what Bran Solo’s work tries to capture or transmit in many of his portraits. That’s why there can be nothing else, just a face, a body, or an emotion.

The process

Due to the difficulties that Bran’s visual functional diversity causes when working, the painter adopts a different process, for some, not very academic, when working.

Retinopathy prevents, among other things, to observe correctly a distant and a close element in a short period of time, it requires adaptation, so it makes it difficult to work from life, where a model poses and the artist works on a close canvas.

On the contrary, Bran works with photography. He takes them himself, or collaborates with other photographers, or looks for old photographs to use as partial or complete reference, and thanks to the digitalization of these photographs and the possibility of enlarging, moving, rotating, zooming out or changing the contrast and color of the image, Bran can visualize the reference and work.

He often works from a printed sketch, decals, or grid references. Other artists project their lace with light, for Bran using light here is impossible.

The final work is sometimes a struggle to fit the form onto the paper, and sometimes a letting go with squinting eyes or using the same sketch or reference as part of the work.

This being so, he considers that the importance of the work is the resulting image and what it can make you feel, where it can transport another person, rather than the more or less academic process that has taken place to compose it.

Bran does not consider himself a painter in the usual sense, but rather a plastic artist with the need to compose and to bring emotions out, as a therapeutic exercise that as a reward can lead another person, anonymous, never revealed, to connect, to awaken, to come to feel the same through the final work.

Paloma Negra

In 2017, together with Daniel El Dibujo, he founded Círculo de Artistas Paloma Negra, with the aim of giving visibility to a group of artists with a similar message and concept of artistic work, fleeing from the artistic vacuity created by the Contemporary Art Market.

Paloma Negra‘s discourse begins with the phrase “Not everything goes“, as a reference to the loss of meaning that contemporary art has experienced after the rise of the artistic avant-gardes.

In addition, Paloma Negra focuses on the figure of the artist as an experienced composer, a being with a different sensibility who, far from pursuing fame, profitability and recognition at all costs, focuses his attention on his work, providing it with message and technique, emotion and meaning, and restores the value of the artistic work by pouring into it the unique and personal impression of the composer.

Initially members of the collective were artists such as Espinaca Explosiva, Fran Munyoz, Alejandro Llamas, Jaume Mora, Dino Galvagno, Pablo Álvarez, Javi Rubín, Julia Navarro, Vorja Sánchez and Oct Streitenberger.