It might sound like it’s from the Pleistocene but it wasn’t that long ago that people lived like that on the balconies of Barcelona. Indeed, other contenders entered the race – from Argentine to Andalusian flags – but in 2014 something flourished that could be defined as a true third way: thick and forceful strokes formed close-ups of intriguing children’s faces on white canvas. Drawings of looks, black on white, designed to attract attention. And if any passerby remained to be questioned, a laconic Why? (Why?, in English) completed the job of not leaving anyone indifferent.
“They still ring my bell to ask me what it all means,” says , the hand responsible for the strokes. The tarps of Why? They ended up becoming a campaign, thanks to the complicity of his partner, Jaume Escala, and these days the protest action for children’s rights commemorates its first decade of life. The last one to ask about the drawing was an English tourist, he adds. The question of why, via intercom, ended up turning into a visit to the workshop of the award-winning illustrator in L’Eixample.
Her balcony is one of the ten places in the Catalan capital where she estimates that you can still see the canvases with her drawings of child victims of the war. The Ona bookstore, in Pau Claris, exhibits one. The boy, with messy hair and a round-neck T-shirt, stares next to the store’s sign. They recently removed another one, from a property on Aragón Street, as they have to rehabilitate the façade. “The city can be filled with places of brunch y souvenirs, but it is prohibited to display a drawing on a balcony,” laments the artist, who has illustrated books by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mercè Rodoreda. His first drawing, he remembers, was published when he was only 23 years old.
Solé, began to paint children as a plastic artist. The faces that ended up converted in the campaign are his version of those of minor victims of various wars around the world and that he has found in photos from newspapers and magazines. Their gazes, he assures, begged him from the paper and the ink to convert them to his lines. Some of those inspirational cuttings remain in his workshop. “Despite all this time, their gazes are still strong, they still question me,” he confesses. Hence, together with Escala, they thought in 2014 that the banners had to be in public spaces to attract the attention of citizens. The balconies of friends and acquaintances were the first natural space that occurred to them to achieve this.
Like some surviving flags of the independence pulse, which resist faded and ragged after the passage of time and the consequences of the liquid politics of the post processthe faces of Why? They also certify the passage of up to 3,653 days, a count that includes leap years. The illustrator, however, acknowledges that she has always made an effort to fix, repaint, and sew fabrics that are not immune to dust, pollution, rain, and the clock. She experiences a dual sensation: on the one hand she likes to see a certain resistance in them, but renovating them reminds her that there is still a lot to do.
according to a report presented by Unicef last September. In black on white, like the faces of Solé, a whopping 363,900 infantrymen. This is a figure that timidly improves on those recorded in the previous two years but is curiously similar to the one recorded in 2013, just when the problem of child poverty elbowed its way onto the Catalan political agenda. “We would be a thousand times better world if we all looked at it with the eyes of a child,” defends Solé.
In all this time Why? She has traveled to Valls, Teià, the Port of Barcelona, Madrid, she was the subject of a large anthology at the Palau Robert… Even in the last edition of the College of Physicians Award, in November, the artist participated by contributing her grain of sand with a big afro girl. And this December, coinciding with the tenth anniversary, children’s gazes came down from the balconies to find themselves in an unexpected place: the posters that commemorate the anniversary competed with those announcing the poster for the next Primavera Sound or the Barça women’s match against Manchester City.
“The cause for children’s rights is something that unites,” the illustrator says with satisfaction. Hence, the ten years of the campaign have not gone unnoticed. Two weeks ago there were a couple of celebrations. First, a more intimate meeting with friends and colleagues, on the 17th, in his studio. Then an artistic intervention in Ciutat Vella, which bad weather forced to move indoors and where in a certain way a change not only pictorial but also conceptual has been made official. Solé goes from the face to the hug: the child no longer just stares, but clings to others. “It was very exciting, because I had written ‘hug’ in different languages. An Arab woman approached me to correct me and another, from India, to include the word in her language,” he recalls. Why this transit? “The hug is a more direct desire to love and care and for peace!” he explains.
