ELVIRA SOLANA
A REVOLUTION
IN THE FORM OF
ARTWORK
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Profile about artist Elvira Solana.
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Photos by Victor Stonem
victorstonem.comElvira Solana
@elvirasolana -
After spending a sunny August morning with Elvira Solana, I feel like I've met a matryoshka, one of those Russian dolls that, when opened around the middle, reveal smaller figures inside. I approach her, attracted by the beauty of her forms, her embellishments and her colour without knowing that, inside her, there is so much more to be found.
During the hour and half that we sit and chat over a cup of tea on her sea-view terrace, she slowly reveals what is beyond the surface of her exquisite work. And, at the same time, I get to discover the layers to Elvira, who takes great care in explaining her work and with it, herself.
Opening the first one, she tells me that she actually studied architecture in Madrid but before long, thanks to several exchange programs, she began to travel: “I went to India, to Barcelona, then I spent some time in Paris and later went to Istanbul. I have always been attracted to the East. It held a certain intrigue for me and, in the end, it was very enlightening.”
Her travels around the world were a great source of inspiration, giving rise to a creativity that she did not get from her university education: “The academic models we have now are good because they are very democratic, but they also somehow standardise everything. And this is what happened to me, that during the training process, I missed out on the manual aspect, a skill that I felt I could contribute.” This, together with her work in several architectural studios in the middle of the economic crisis, created an internal conflict within Elvira that led her to leave architecture behind. “I started painting and decided to try it for a year to see if it would take off. And it did. At first, I painted birds, plants, etc., but after a while I started to connect architecture and painting without even realising it.” After researching murals throughout history, Elvira began to understand that her training as an architect was not entirely unrelated to her approach to murals. “The first muralists in history were architects. I understood why I became curiously fascinated with combining these two aspects and why it wasn't so far from me and my profession.”
“My commitment to the indoor mural is based on researching the relationship that human beings have with space and privacy”
Following this enlightening realisation, Elvira took her brushes and a backpack and left Cantabria to return to Madrid in search of walls to work on. “You see, sometimes the planets align and that's what happened. I ran into a friend from university who had just bought a house: 'It's been closed for sixty years and we have to refurbish it, but you have six months to try out your work there,' he told me.” After five months of work, Elvira inaugurated ‘Real Estate’, convening several media outlets. She still remembers being full of nerves on the days leading up to it. She slept on a mattress in the middle of that empty house’s living room. “I didn't know if what I was doing was going to work or not. It was a miracle. There are many days when I remember that it was only three years ago. The flat turned out to be an incredible place measuring about 350m2, which I enlarged to 10,000m2. With ‘Real Estate’ I established the principles upon which I was going to base the rest of my career.”
“In murals, as in architecture, you need a first project for clients to trust you”, she explains to me. Her case makes perfect sense in theory, and I tell her that at Openhouse, we were amazed when we found out, through Instagram, about the mural that she had done in the house of a relative in Santo Domingo. And on the subject of privacy and social networks, Elvira opens up a new matryoshka. “My commitment to the indoor mural is based on researching the relationship that human beings have with space and privacy. I don't have WhatsApp, and I only have Instagram for work”, a practice that requires a certain break with the system, a lot of courage and a great deal of obstinacy. “We live surrounded by images that we compulsively consume. But the image expires and dies quickly if it is not supported by an idea. Ideas are the structure. They allow an image to remain in time without being immediately exhausted; this is the purpose of my work”.
A month after our meeting, I know that Elvira, a troubadour of mural architecture, may have had countless new revelations that she has captured in her mock-ups and in her many notebooks, her daily work tools. “These notebooks carry ideas that at some point will be turned into murals. They are ideas that allow me to keep moving forward.” In these times of endless accelerated consumption, meeting someone with an elaborated and meditated discourse like Elvira is a true breath of fresh air. “A mural is an overlapping of two languages: that of architecture, which is three-dimensional and volumetric and implies a movement around it; and that of painting, which is two-dimensional and has a frontal perception. I don't want to resolve the idea of continuity but to question all the conflicts about the perception of the human eye versus the scale of the place or its context.”
Opening the last matryoshka takes me to her studio, just a few metres from the flat where she is staying for the summer. There, she also uses an attic-like room as a canvas where she puts many of her ideas into practice. Few people, she confesses, have seen what is hidden at the top of the tower. When I set one last foot in this space of reverie, I feel that I am entering a new space not governed by the physical rules that apply outside it. Perhaps, I think, this is the true purpose behind Elvira Solana's work: the search for a room of our own that transforms our perspective, pulling us to dream of a new reality.