SOL CALERO – LA SAUNA CALIENTE

About

Venezuelan artist Sol Calero has developed a multiform practice to explore cultural codes and image production in Latin America. In carefully arranged environments colorful paintings, saturated with exotic fruits, and flowers, spread out beyond the canvas as such across ceilings, walls, and furniture. In combination with objects and props Calero transforms exhibition venues into vibrant and immersive domestic spaces in form of hair salons, salsa studios, cyber cafés, film sets, or sites for creative exchange; spaces, in which the traditional art objects appear as an aesthetic support of a social experience. While referencing Latin American art history as well as influential historical moments such as Roosevelts »Good Neighbour Policy« (implemented in the 1930s), it is this continuous unfolding and reformulating of prevalent cultural stereotypes that form the center her inquiry. In particular in countries without a strong pre-Colombian culture like Venezuela, politically constructed identities have affected the people whose cultural symbols had been appropriated in the first place, leading them to recycle such narratives and adopt them as part of their culture. Analogue to her own personal situation as a Latin American artist who lived abroad for the majority of her life, Calero reverses the described process by appropriating and implementing this recycled stereotypical imagery.

For her first institutional solo exhibition in Austria, LA SAUNA CALIENTE, Calero continued those inquiries within a new site-specific installation in the KUB Collection Showcase. By inviting the audience to immerse in a seductive, spa-like relaxation scenario Calero inscribed her work in the regional landscape of Vorarlberg as a site for sports, body and wellness culture, while at the same time dismantling the complexities of Latin American identity constructions. Via a conscious adaptation of prevalent clichéd imagery related to places like the Caribbean – most obvious in pseudo-exotic utopian resorts like Tropical Islands in Brandenburg, Germany – the gallery space itself is turned into an artificial, dislocated, tropical site for holistic visual cleansing treatments and the playful complication of the dynamics related to identitarian exoticizations.

Contributions by Gregorie Blunt, Conglomerate, Rubén D´Hers, Trevor Good, Cristian Guardia, Hanne Lippard, Dafna Maimon and Erika Ordosgoitti not only further complement Caleros explorations, but turn her solo exhibition into container for other artists work to be experienced during the SPA visit. Among others, Desde el Jardín, a telenovela written and directed by Calero and artist Dafna Maimon, and produced with Conglomerate, will be featured for the first time in full length in the relaxation room of LA SAUNA CALIENTE.