Sol Calero receives so calmly less than 24 hours after its inauguration at the CA2M in rooms that are still very upside down, with workers everywhere, walls to paint and videos to be rescheduled. He does it with a gray overcoat with the lapels and skirts covered with colorful brush strokes and a frank and relaxed smile. He clearly has a plan and order clearly reigns beneath the apparent chaos, and it becomes evident during the visit – almost more like the walk – to the exhibition. We chat as if we had all the time in the world, no one from the cohort of people working interrupts with emergencies or last-minute alarms, and his clarity of ideas and his gift for accurate expression confirm what one no longer doubted anyway after follow his work for years: that beneath the colorful and supposedly “tropical” variety, behind the facilities that are voluntarily hospitable and attractive to the visitor’s eye and butt (good seats are always plentiful in Calero’s productions) there is a lot of conceptual rigor and a lot hours of prior work in the studio of an artist for whom the word “multidisciplinary” falls short.
Calero is an excellent painter, furniture designer and almost self-taught architect, with a striking ability to create her own highly recognizable vocabulary and syntax (false windows and columns, pastel colors, plastic vines and ultra-thin upholstery). kitsch They sometimes recall Sottsas and Memphis, Aldo Rossi and the seminal Learning from Las Vegas by Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi). And to conceive with these elements new types of spaces through which she transforms even the most devilish and icy place that the institution that invites her can provide. He also writes the texts for the audios that accompany some of his pieces, and makes films, and even makes time to curate his own space in Berlin, where he has lived since leaving his native Venezuela in 1999, at the age of 17, prior stopovers in Tenerife or Paris.
His work alludes with irony and sadness to the mental landscape of the displaced on a land that they idealized and blurred when rethinking it.
Calero has been chaining together magnificent works and interventions for years that those who saw and experienced on site do not forget: right now his work is still in the Giardini of Venice Creole Pavilion (be careful, because while so many artists around here insist on titling everything in English, she has never abandoned her mother tongue when naming her projects: let them translate them), a brilliant trick based on recycled elements from past biennials , like a falsely fragile house of the three little pigs, ephemeral in time and indelible in the retina and memory. And before that he put on a very complete show at Art Basel Exchange House like those that could be seen in Caracas in 2016, and also, throughout the most select art centers in Europe, a sauna, and a travel agency, and a Shopping Amazon. Spaces that were at the same time carefully planned and looked studiously disheveled, as if they had been assembled with four bitches and clearance furniture the day before. They seemed like pure jokes but they immediately froze the smile, and beneath the supposed friendliness of manners, tensions and even tragedies began to be perceived: that of those who travel (or even go into exile) far from their homeland, that of those who have to “integrate” and be grateful that they do. tolerate in the “host” country, that of someone who longs for places that fade in memory and change in reality until the nostalgia becomes loud, frenetic, almost deranged.
That provisionality, that air of detachment of his best works and colorful beach bars are not, at all, a parody of “what is tropical”, or “what is Caribbean”, or “what is Latin”, or “what is Hispanic”. They are in any case, and even more so seen in the countries of rich Europe where they have been shown most often, a parody (sometimes really bloody and angry) of the way in which those places and those clichés and topics are thought or imagined there. Millions of people arriving from that “beyond” are forced to conform and at the same time to shed those identities.
And also, in a more meditative, more intimate way, his architecture and especially his painting are a somewhat melancholic allusion, with its drops of irony and sadness carried with humor, to the mental landscape of all the displaced people who long for a land they have He has been idealizing and blurring by rethinking it: the memory of the memory of the memory that no longer exists except in his memory. These landscapes somewhere between the remembered, the invented and the absurd can be seen passing by in the CA2M on board the installation The buswhich takes up the ideas and forms of those already shown at the Tate Liverpool and the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. We visitors become tourists or travelers through a Latin America that parades through the video windows-screens, and that sarcastically reproduces in its clichés and tacky English an announcer/tour guide who reads the texts (very funny) written by the person herself. Calero. Behind the windows you can also see the large-format murals and paintings in the house’s trademark pastel colors and architectural forms: they reproduce lush green backdrops with biting hints of colonial paint and self-built facades of the Los Roques archipelago, a privileged summer resort for the Venezuelan elites for decades, a place that is paradoxically humble and at the same time prohibitive for the average tourist.
Later, the rooms are decorated with neon and low lights to reproduce the nighttime atmosphere of a small inland city. The curtains and illuminated signs invite you to enter an improvised popular cinema where the Venezuelan soap opera pastiche is projected. from the gardenwritten and directed by Calero and Dafna Maimon and other members of the Conglomerate collective. We enter here into a terrain that is not far from that explored by Manuel Puig in his novels and plays, Painted mouths to Tropical night falls: that of the serial, the fotonovela and the minor genres understood as an alienated and alienating expression of popular classes devoid of references and at the same time that of cinema as the only means of escape, critical reflection and sublimation of hostile political and economic realities. The comic and the tragic intermingle on the screen and beyond it, and the taste of the soursops that give the title to this exhibition is, once again, as always with Calero, painfully bittersweet.
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