We Can't Make You Younger is a collaboration between the Belgian, Mexico City-based writer Benoît Loiseau and the Mexican, Mexico City-based artist Manuel Solano. The collaboration consists of three short stories written by Loiseau, which Solano has illustrated. Simply and directly written, the stories deal with fundamental issues, including loss, sexuality, romantic attachment and so-called spirituality.
'At once timely, they contain a measured dose of references to popular culture. They are spare, understated and moving. At first blush, their general restraint might seem to be an odd counterpart for Solano's messy and expressive finger painting, but you work your way through the stories and encounter precisely what points you decide to illustrate- repeating a phrase from the text seemingly plucked at random: a song lyric or the title of a book- the collaboration coheres with surprising and touching harmony, not to mention humour.
Why is this? I think it has something to do with the seemingly aleatory quality of what Solano is, how it seems almost incidental, which creates a certain symmetry between the two approaches. This incidental-ness, for lack of a better word, operates in a variety of ways. First of all, it, the fact of illustrating Loiseau's stories functions as a conceptual conceit, in so far as it becomes the machine which generates the subject matter of the paintings. What is doubly interesting about this is what to conceive would seem to excuse Solano from the onus of selecting subject matter, making it personal, it nevertheless is.'
Foreword by Chris Sharp.
-
36 pgs, 21 × 14 cm, Softcover, 2017,