ART CITIES:Berlin-Richard Kennedy and Manuel Solano
Richard Kennedy and Manuel Solano present their solo exhibitions at Peres Projects in Berlin. Richard Kennedy creates works that erase the boundary between choreography and environment. The artist fell in love with opera as a child. His local community theater in suburban Ohio served as an escape as well as an entry point for what developed into a life-long passion for the performing arts. Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s rebellious nature drove him to keep making art rather than giving up his past life.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Peres Projects Archive
For his first exhibition in Europe, Richard Kennedy presents “(G)hosting” an opera without an audience, which was developed over the course of his 2019 summer residency at Open Forum in Berlin. Considering opera through a language of African American experience – drawing on the oral histories told through spirituals and chain gang songs, Kennedy disrupts the tradition of Western Theatre, where the primary mode of engagement is through observation, in order to generate new participatory modes of viewership. The title of the exhibition plays on the term hosting, which has been taken up in the gay community on online forums and apps for dating, to indicate a space that’s safe for invitation (i.e. can you host), and ghosting – to drop out of a situation without warning or explanation. The overlapping and entangled actions of hosting and then ghosting, that fit together in spite of their oppositional meanings indicates Kennedy’s preoccupation with the epistemological force of language. The spaces opened up in language for seemingly contradictory affects to coexist. Manuel Solano’s earliest paintings were all about subtle gradient and tone; photo-realistic objects emerged from mist or disappeared in receding space. But in early 2014, the Mexico City-based painter started to go blind as a result of an H.I.V.-related infection. Working with limited eyesight, Solano began creating colorful work that burst off the walls. Celebrities became expressionist portraits, and darkly humorous text-based works raised questions about gender identity and the source of an H.I.V.-positive artist’s value in the money-mad art world. Since then, Solano’s blindness has become complete. It has also become a new way of seeing. In the last four years, Solano has developed techniques for navigating blindness through each new series of paintings. Now the artist uses pins, string, tape and pipe cleaners to outline different areas of canvases, and relies on other people’s eyes as guidance. Solano’s subject matter has shifted to pulling from memory: family portraits, scenes from beloved films and pop cultural moments we’ve collectively experienced. For his solo exhibition, Manuel Solano has created a series of new works that continue their engagement with problems of identity and subjecthood. The characters in his solo exhibition “Portraits” do not figure under a unifying theme or have anything in common other than that they have struck the artist in one way or another. In this sense, the body of work produced for this exhibition demonstrates the conditional and relational nature of identity – that the subject is comprised of the many people in one’s life. As the artist says “I have portrayed several people in this series who are close to me but whom I have never seen. Damien, for example. I met Damien at the opening of the first show I had after going blind, just a few months after I became blind. We became friends and I knew only vague basic details about his appearance”.
Info: Peres Projects, Karl-Marx-Allee 82, Berlin, Duration: Richard Kennedy. “(G)hosting” 27/9-25/10/19, “Manuel Solano. Portraits” 13/9-25/10/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com
