Eduardo Solá Franco – The autobiographical impulse

Through more than 100 works, this exhibition aims to bring us closer to the work of Eduardo Solá Franco, relating his artistic production to the events and circumstances that shaped his own life experience.

The lack of understanding of the artist’s unique work, in his time, was due to several factors, on the one hand his painting did not fit within the dominant international currents, that is, it did not even adhere to formalist aspects (the different types of abstraction, for example) nor those that made art a platform for social demands (realism, indigenism, etc.). On the other hand, his upper-class background and his aversion to political militancy caused him problems with the local cultural institutions dominated by left-wing thought.

In that context, the complexity that his work presented was not assumed, also crossed by a sensitivity specific to his sexual identity and by concerns derived from his complex spiritual dimension. These two aspects further complicated his reception in a conservative cultural environment. Solá developed an extremely personal visual universe in the middle of a world that in his eyes was progressively decomposing, hence the incessant invocation to classical antiquity and the “paradise lost” of the past. Through his work with symbolist roots, characterized by a combined narrative figuration and an extravagant formal eclecticism, the artist aspired to achieve an individual balance based on other types of searches: the representation of his own existential uncertainties, images that gave body to his desires, his inner world and the contradictions of the human being. Most of the works that make up this exhibition were found in a warehouse abandoned for years in Rome, rescued after his death. This personal collection, exhibited selectively and fragmented during his life although jealously guarded by the artist until the end of his days, today allows a look that reconstructs the deep meanings of his work. The exhibition is divided into eight cores that weave together various aspects of his career.

Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers

Exhibition Curator