Sol Calero. Buscando guanábana ando yo (I am looking for guanabana). Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo presents “Buscando guanábana ando yo” by Sol Calero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982), whose title is inspired by Rubén Blades' popular song “Buscando guayaba ando yo”. The exhibition curated by Tania Pardo, the guanabana, a fruit native to Central America and the Caribbean, symbolizes the search for the essential: identity, belonging, or the sense of home. The exhibition explores concepts associated with movement and displacement, which are materialized through monumental installations incorporating murals, sculptures, and paintings that seek to recreate the migrant experience, the fact of being born in one place and living in another. This is the case of the artist, born in Venezuela, where she lived until the age of seventeen, when, together with her family, she settled in Tenerife, then spent some time in Madrid and finally settled in Berlin, where she is currently based. The passage through different countries and her condition as a Latin American immigrant has been decisive in developing a work focused on the identity character related to the symbols of Latin American culture.
The project “Buscando guanábana ando yo,” the first solo show dedicated to Sol Calero in a Madrid institution, brings together some of the main characteristics of her work, such as the construction of collective spaces in which much of her production and interest in architecture and design is condensed; mural painting, a technique she has used since the beginning of her career, where fruits and vegetation become graphic and symbolic resources with overflowing colors; and votive offerings, sculptures that make references to folklore and popular beliefs. On this occasion, the artist has created a version of the installation “The Bus,” which she showed for the first time at the Tate in Liverpool (2019) and later at the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki (2022), now conceived as the starting point of the exhibition route. In this way, Calero presents a guided tour through an audiovisual installation that proposes to visitors a journey through fictitious places, challenging the conventions related to travel and leisure. In this way, she explores the figure of the tourist and the discrepancy between the idealized perception of a place and the reality encountered when exploring it. Latin American art is often perceived as homogeneous, reduced to a simplified vision of a specific region. Calero uses this perspective to question cultural stereotypes within and outside Latin American countries, revealing how expectations can differ from actual experience.
Through the symbolism, which alludes to Latin American popular culture, Calero reflects on the power and ambiguity of cultural signs, the clichés, and the connotations these symbols acquire in different social and political contexts, influencing questions of gender and identity. The guanabana, which appears here for the first time in her work, symbolizes the artist's journey. This constant search is captured for the first time in the canvases of this exhibition, inviting the visitor to build a “new place” through a journey in which the aesthetics of displacement arise from the transformation of everyday elements, thus reconfiguring a new reality.