From the second half of the 1980s, Susana Solano pared down her artistic language to the bare essentials. The format of her pieces gradually took on a monumental character, and a certain ironic tone, underscored by the titles of her works, became apparent. Falset and Montblanc, for example, two towns from her childhood, feature in certain titles in a complex play of analogies. Other times, the relationship between the titles and the works themselves gives rise to perverse paradoxes. Fa el Set—seven pieces that Susana Solano showed at the Venice Biennale in 1988—is a solidified fragment of her life, a work that marks out a human space constructed by memory, which renders it timeless. Susana Solano turns a recollection into abstract forms. Each work is a territory that did not exist until she created it—an architecture of volumes and spaces born out of experience, out of her intimate, personal world of sensations. The artist had previously worked with everyday furnishings in her environment, and with the human body and its clothing. In this work, which originates in the landscape, she builds a new protective barrier. The habitat of her own roots measures out memory and engages in a dialectical interplay with the space, which becomes an open horizon, beyond its boundaries. Condensed by pronounced verticality, the space uses granite in pieces made of cold materials like iron, lead and steel.
