Teresa Solar Abboud: “Tu sombra sustituida”
Teresa Solar Abboud, Estadio sexual indiferenciado, 2024. Tu sombra sustituida installation view, Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, México, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Teresa Solar Abboud’s exhibition Tu sombra sustituida at Travesía Cuatro in Mexico City opens with Estadio sexual indiferenciado (2024). Like a ruptured chrysalidal form, from a rough organic clay exterior emerges a sleekly smooth interior of neon green resin. The series of works continue down a narrow hallway, unfurling and unravelling across the gallery floor, evoking a tension that suggests a bursting open. It’s as though we are just moments too late to witness a creature emerge from its obtect pupa. The hard shell casings reference the gestation state, laying bare their insides.
Teresa Solar Abboud, Tuneladora, 2024. Tu sombra sustituida installation view, Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, México, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Across the exhibition, Solar Abboud mines the exchange between the industrial and the organic, using the contrast between coarse rocky clay and an engineered machine-like resin finish to contemplate the relationship between humans and the natural world. Two works from the series Tuneladora (both 2024), for example, are composed of two distinct sections: an organic fired-clay spine representing the sphere of the earth, and sleek industrial-smooth abstracted forms representing fragments of familiar yet dreamlike bodies. Blurring boundaries between the real and imagined, the sculptural works are suggestive of surreal marine-life fossils fit with industrialized and highly polished finishes. Constructed at imposing scales and expressed in shades of midnight, the forms appear heavy. Despite this, they float effortlessly in the stark white backdrop of the gallery as if they were weightless.
Teresa Solar Abboud, Night Crawler (2024) andTuneladora (2024). Tu sombra sustituida installation view, Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, México, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Night Crawler (2024), a watercolour and ink work on paper, further expands the artist’s interest in mysterious bodies of the oceanic abyss. Echoing the blue tones of her sculptural works, the drawing provides a perspective on a strange and fantastical creature of the deep sea. The exhibition includes several works on paper. These draw connections to Solar Abboud’s accumulated research process for her sculptural works, which involves layered sketchbooks full of original drawings influenced by images from magazines and books that reference various organic bodies.
Teresa Solar Abboud, Simbionte, 2024 and Unfolding, 2024. Tu sombra sustituida installation view, Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, México, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Drawings from the series Unfolding (2024) provide corporeal studies, though this time from the perspective of the human female form. Likewise, two sculptural works rendered in a fleshy pink and red allude to the femme anatomical body, their shapes speaking to states of ripening and reproduction. Winking at the art historical nude, Solar Abboud provides a perspective from inside the feminine frame. One work from the series, Simbionte (2024), is a study of the ecosystems of organisms that exist within one another. In it, a multi-pronged structure surrounds a viscera-like form, ensnaring it within its tentacle-like appendages. Its shape also seems to imply a clitoral body; the oversized surreal formal work could make you blush. A nearby sculpture, Autorretrato como mujer embarazada (2024), spirals open like a ribcage, metaphorically and literally nodding to the expansion of a lifeform that comes with both inhalation and gestation.
Teresa Solar Abboud, Autorretrato como mujer embarazada, 2024. Tu sombra sustituida installation view, Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, México, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.
Taken together, Tu sombra sustituida is a study of beings and their physical, reproductive and psychic bodies. Often speaking to the female form, Solar Abboud’s oversized sculptural works evoke a ribcage or a pelvis—the containers of the body—sexual organs, and the alchemistic states of fecundation and propagation. Solar Abboud engages with not only the human, but also the geologic, the parasitic, the marine, the animal, and the mythical, citing a symbiosis and shared biological constitution that emerges from the soil.
Teresa Solar Abboud: Tu sombra sustituida is on view at Travesía Cuatro, CDMX, from February 4th to April 25th, 2025.
Edited by Xuezhu Jenny Wang
