Teresa Solar and the dream of the tactile

Barcelona,

Teresa Solar Abboud is the daughter of a Spanish father and an Egyptian mother and those family ties are the reason she can speak Arabic, although not read or write it, a coincidental circumstance that is also the origin of some of her creative concerns: she is interested in the concept of translation in a broad sense, which goes beyond the textual, the morphology of speech and the possibilities of approaching language from techniques such as sculpture or installation.

His production presents narratives in many layers and reflections on the notions of isolation and resistance, although, like that of his generation partner June Crespo, it also incorporates connotations of connectivity, of transit of flows; In his case, the suggestion of bodily organs is linked to the evocation of his ability to generate words.

In recent years, Solar has been developing large-format installations made up of sculptures that generate families among themselves and that can be twinned despite the disparity in their sizes and shapes; They give rise to ecosystems and are inseparable from their discourses on macro and micro issues: on what we understand by mechanisms of social progress in our time and on narratives of the small and linked to the failures of the body and its capacity for expression, such as injuries. sports or stuttering; Sometimes, they also refer their works to discoveries on walks around the city.

In addition to differing in their format, these pieces differ in their materials, from clay to found objects, and they relate to each other based on their references to the properties of the organic or the industrial, the latter sphere tending towards hybridization. of the natural and the synthetic. Solar Abboud’s work with clay is especially attractive, due to its symbolic aspect of the relationships between human beings and the earth, whose insulating qualities allow him to devise caves from which to transmit those stories about self-protection that we were talking about. In this type of proposals, raw and coarse exteriors usually contrast with interiors with delicate finishes and bright tones that, at times, can remind us of the colors of the overalls used by miners or those of the aerosols that mark new tunnels. trace underground.

In the first half of this year, this author presented at the Dos de Mayo Art Center in Móstoles the first part of a long-term exhibition project that now takes her to the MACBA in Barcelona and will have its outcome at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo of Turin. The exhibition in the Madrid town was titled “Bird’s Dream Machine”, while the Barcelona exhibition is called “Bird’s Dream Machine” and the Italian one has been baptized “Bird’s Dream Machine”; Both of them collect his production of recent years and focus on how Solar’s work with matter, and his study through it of language and, in general, of all bodily production, is susceptible to transforming or expanding depending on the place where it is displayed. It is no coincidence that Solar addresses the CA2M as a space of contraction, the Raval museum as a space of expansion (here the presentation has been expanded with new pieces) and the Fondazione Sandretto as a place for rereading previous approaches, by by Irene Calderoni. In this case, this living organism will contract again: mutatis mutandis.

In Móstoles we found pieces conceived specifically for the two rooms of the CA2M that housed them and that condensed recent research on the relationships between the corporeal and the industrial and the metaphors that derive from them (holes that incorporate voids, gaps that allow flows), but In Barcelona, the links between the real and the imaginary and plastic finishes that, due to their brilliance and smooth appearance, refer to industrial aesthetics have acquired greater weight. In the Catalan capital, from November 21 and again under the curatorship of Tania Pardo and Claudia Segura, we will be able to see early works alongside the most recent by this author, who in her beginnings also worked in the practice of drawing and painting. video when delving into the origin of each form and the ideas that can orbit around them.

Teresa Solar Abboud. Dream machine bird. MACBA. Photography: Miquel Coll, 2024

This exhibition precisely seeks to ensure that viewers familiar with the corporality and sculptural presence of Teresa Solar’s proposals delve into their conceptual and aesthetic background and become aware of the depth of the links that can be established between her creations and the place where they are shown, note common to most of his exhibitions until now and that is based on his own experience of the environment: When I visit a space where I am going to work for the first time, I try to understand how it affects me. I think it is likely that my sensations are similar to those of the people who pass through and live in that specific space, so I think they can be the best bridge to connect with them.. It is common for it to use, for this reason, architectural elements, interactive technologies and very diverse materials, proposing to review the nature of the interiors we inhabit and the way in which they leave a mark on our way of thinking or feeling.

They already inhabit the rooms of the MACBA – of whose collection Solar is a part despite his youth, with two sculptures from the 2022 series Tunnel Boring Machine– his early forays into video, equally early ceramic works, soft works made with very diverse materials, the immersive and recent sculptural installations, which we began talking about, and drawings and sketchbooks (the latter conceived as artist books) that give clues to its creation process, the root of its forms and its way of understanding, even perception.

We will thus discover that science fiction and ancient art are two of the sources of both Solar Abboud’s thought and work, and that this has not remained at all outside the artist’s relationship with the generation of contemporary authors, many Madrid, with whom he has coincided. Both are noted, although not explicitly, in their search for mechanisms to represent resistance, emptiness (cavities, orifices), the body and its bone support, and to do so by contrasting textures associated with that nature and the organic. with industrial aesthetic finishes, strong in their solidity and brilliant. Little will be what it seems in this montage, because the artist is equally interested in delving into the capacity for suggestion of the hybrid, of the confusion between the fictitious, the real and the plausible.

Ultimately, Solar offers us stories about the frequent isolation and liquid forms of connectivity of the contemporary subject, subjected to constant displacement and perhaps a fragmentary state; also vindications of the tactile, of our options to look by touching, in a time of incorporeality. A fossil dreams of being a machine, an excavating machine dreams of becoming a bird, a dream becomes a bird machine.