BOOK 2018
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Born in Abarán, Murcia (Spain), in 1985, Bran Sólo defines himself as a “Good person, painter, illustrator, designer and photographer, as well as many other things I never wanted to be“. Since childhood he is interested in artistic expression and culture developing hobbies such as scale modeling, reading scientific-technological articles and music, and also enjoys as an amateur of astronomy, archaeology and the history of ancient Egypt and Arab countries, as well as Celtic culture, paleontology and especially oil painting and drawing. Graduated in 2006 in Computer Applications Development and Database Analysis, he worked for seven years in the technology sector. In 2010 he participated in the official programme 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. In 2012 he decided to abandon his work as a computer programmer and lifestyle to devote himself to drawing and enroll in the School of Art of Murcia, leaving behind family, couple and home and moving alone to a studio in the city of Murcia.
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It is in the same school where he discovers that an eye disease, of unknown origin, conditions his perception from childhood. A macular lesion, formed by scars in the central area of the retina, distorts the images in a way that he describes as “kaleidoscopic“, sharply multiplying the images with high contrast or brightness. Here, he discovers that he cannot certainly find the line that separates a white area from a black one, confuses volume with emptiness, the positive with the negative and, except in specific light circumstances, perceives all objects multiplied up to eight or ten copies, depending on distance, and especially those that are luminous, making it difficult to visualize screens and projections as well as elements that emit or reflect moderate amounts of light. This condition, which forces the brain to interpret reality very subjectively, gives him a “unique vision”, which he sustains with humour “is the most important quality that an artist must have“.
He finished his studies in 2014 and graduated in Plastic Arts and Design in Illustration, presenting in his final project the Tarot de Laguna by which he is qualified with the highest score of the jury, which grants him an Erasmus scholarship that takes him to Porto. After his stay in the Portuguese city, he moved to Madrid where he officially began his artistic career. He moves in 2015 to Barcelona where he continues his work. In 2015 he has his first solo exhibition: “Perfume de flor de cuchillo” (based in Federico García Lorca poetry) in Kipfer&Lover, Malaga, which is a great success. He returns to Murcia in 2016 where he currently resides. From that moment on, his career advances exponentially and in a short time he manages to show his work at the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga, at the ESTAMPA fair in Madrid, at the gallery NB7 of the FLECHA fair in the same city, as well as in other spaces such as Échale Guindas Galería, Matraca Gallery, VillaPuchero Factory, Factoria de Arte y Desarrollo, Swinton & Grant, The Folio Club, El Gallinero or Vergel Espacio.
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In addition, he collaborates with the publishers of 180hilos, exhibiting works in serial edition at MACBA and CCCB in Barcelona, CAIXA Forum Madrid and at the Centre Pompidou in Malaga, at Hôtel Gaythering in Miami South Beach, as part of the ArtBasel parallel exhibitions, as well as ARCO Art Fair 2018 (Llibreria Laie Booth) and manages to find a place in specialised shops and art galleries inside and outside Spain. In 2018 he publishes for sale the Tarot de Laguna, a research and personal development work based on the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. He is currently researching the relationship between science and art, which he says is “inseparable to me“, as well as being interested in the graphic study of other subjects such as masculinity, fear and human emotions, love and blindness.
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Workshops Graphical transfer is a manual but perfectly ďŹ nished process that makes it possible to capture any type of image on a wide variety of materials and objects. The process is simple and can be done at home, although an optimal result requires patience and practice. It is a workshop aimed at amateurs and professionals of art, photography, illustration and design who are interested in transferring an image on different materials in a lasting way, as well as for any person who loves handicrafts or decoration who is looking for new forms of handmade graphic creation. Bran has been giving this workshop in the last two years, with great reception in specialized centers, galleries and workshops all over Spain.
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The Tarot de Laguna Created and edited by Bran SĂłlo, The Tarot de Laguna is not a tool for divination and magic. With this Tarot, and through the interpretation of the symbols represented in its cards, it is urged to analyze and understand the messages of the subconscious, not from the mysticism of divination, but from the psychoanalytic task of listening to and understanding oneself. Learning to listen to oneself. The true usefulness of this tool based on the Tarot, and of any Tarot, resides in the interpretative subjectivity of the symbols it contains, and even more, in the magical and esoteric association that we still grant to this type of interpretative processes, closer in reality to psychoanalysis than to God. Twenty-two arcana. The 22 arcana (22 cards) of the Laguna Tarot have been rethought to cover all aspects of current psychology, including in their
symbols the total of human emotions and feelings, and the most important concepts of psychoanalytic study. There is more to it than you see. The purpose of this card game is personal development and awareness of the personal conditioning factors to which experience accustoms us. The way to achieve this is thanks to the process of identiďŹ cation of these conditioning factors, through introspective study mechanisms such as free association games that manifest the unconscious relationships between various aspects of reality that are automatically triggered during the cognitive experience. That is, to be aware of unconscious relationships. In this way, the project as a whole has been conceived under the same premises of this exercise, the free association, granting certain curious characteristics to the result.
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Classic Format The deck consists of a total of 22 cards based on structure but not on names or meanings, in the original Mantegna Tarot, used for educational purposes during the 15th century. Scientific Basis The Laguna Tarot has been designed from the foundations of psychoanalysis to serve as an introspective guide and personal development. Personal Use Given the importance of free association in the interpretation of card symbols, the Tarot is used alone, to oneself. Hidden Content Hidden between the texts and illustrations are clues and messages that tell a story that may be yours. Self-help Guide By means of this oracle the exercise of introspection is made possible, and the own analysis and the study of the emotions and thoughts that condition our way of being and, with it, our destiny.
Ser uno mismo es no tener el to valor To be yourself is not have
the courage to beuno whoquiere you want to B.S. be - B.S. rtirse en quien ser —
All the information of the Tarot de Laguna in www.tarotdelaguna.com
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Collaborations Hipólito Nocturno is the result of the collaboration with Ornamante, a design studio born and located in Barcelona, which took place during Bran’s stay in the city for about a year. The project, parallel to the collaboration of five other illustrators (Asís Percales, Siscu Romero, Dulk, Raúl del Sol and Lantomo) was presented in the city with great success. As usual, Bran Sólo's illustrations have been made for the viewer to decide their meaning based on their own experience, and again the chosen technique (white on black) makes the task difficult due to the artist's vision problems in these conditions. The main image, located in Hipólito's belly, shows a scene in which a ship is about to be shipwrecked, perhaps due to the appearance of the head of a man who emerges, between tears, from the bottom of the sea causing a great swell. In the centre, two narwhals raise their horns surprised by the appearance of a tentacle, a marine arm that holds a white heart tightly. It is not known if it drags it towards the depths, or if it has just taken it out of them. One of the project's strong points is the inclusion of a QR code, placed on the back of the hippopotamus, which gives access to a portal developed entirely by Bran Sólo (making use of programming knowledge from a previous life), in which its owner, and only its owner, can "talk" through messages in real time with the animal through the mobile phone.
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GALLERY
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Campaign for ABSOLUT Vodka 2017
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Puntos de
BRAN SÓLO WWW.BRANSOLO.COM BRAN@BRANSOLO.COM 0034 608 773 878