Beneath the Visible
Duet Exhibition Featuring
Carina Söderström
Teresa Guadalupe Olds
Beneath the Visible
Curatorial Statement
Beneath the Visible brings together the works of Carina Söderström and Teresa Olds in an exhibition that explores the unseen dimensions of existence—the emotional, spiritual, and psychological landscapes that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Through deeply introspective practices, both artists seek to reveal what often remains hidden beneath the surface: the inner presence within the human body, the memory held within experience, and the quiet forces that connect us to something greater.
For Carina Söderström, painting becomes a way of searching for the essence that exists beyond physical appearance. Her work reflects a profound curiosity about existence and the relationships between humanity and nature. Through figures, organic forms, and the emotional qualities of water, stone, trees, and atmosphere, she explores the invisible energy that connects all living things. Her layered oil paintings seek to move beyond representation, allowing the surface of the canvas to disappear and revealing instead the deeper emotions, thoughts, and presence that reside within her subjects.
Teresa Olds approaches painting as a process of uncovering and reclaiming what has been hidden. Her work is rooted in vulnerability, memory, spirituality, and transformation, drawing from personal experiences of identity, illness, loss, and awakening. Through symbolic and emotionally charged imagery, she creates spaces where personal narratives become universal reflections on survival, connection, and the complexity of human experience. Her paintings explore thresholds—the moments between absence and presence, vulnerability and strength, the known and the unknown.
Although their artistic journeys emerge from different experiences, both artists share a commitment to exploring what cannot always be expressed through words. Their works reveal that identity is not limited to what is visible; it is shaped by memories carried within us, emotions that remain unspoken, and connections that exist beyond physical form.
Beneath the Visible invites viewers into a contemplative space where the internal and external worlds meet. Through the language of painting, Söderström and Olds remind us that beneath every surface lies a deeper story—one of resilience, transformation, and the enduring search for meaning.
ABOUT Carina Söderström
Carina Söderström was born in Stockholm, Sweden but her heritage is Finnish. With parents that were immigrants the heart and interest in social issues led her to combine Art Science studies at Stockholm University with Art Therapy studies in St Albans, England.
She also worked within this field for a long time until she was in her 40’s. Then Carina studied Art in Beckman’s School of Art and Design in Stockholm and invested wholeheartedly in her artistry and has done so since. Carina Söderström has been awarded with The Tellervo Tikkanen’s scholarship for the Swedish-Finnish artist of the year 2017.
Her work can be found as well in schools, preschools and homes for the elderly, Sundbyberg town hall and other public institutions as in private homes.
Exhibitions:
The artist has been shown in single and group exhibitions in Sweden and in a number of other countries.
In Sweden: Stockholm, Sundbyberg, Nyköping, Eskilstuna, Visby and Sigtuna.
Abroad in: Milano, Helsinki, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Basel (online) and Chile (online) to mention some.
Gallery representation by Galleri Lorentzon, Stockholm, Sweden, Van Gogh Art Gallery in Madrid, Spain and Novum Investment, Basel, Switzerland, Tapiial Virtual, Chile and https://artistarena.co
ARTIST STATEMENT
What does it mean to exist?
This question has followed me since childhood.
I remember wondering, even then, what is truly real. What is a reflection? What is a dream? Is there a depth beyond what we see? These questions have never left me. They have accompanied me through drawing, painting, writing, and dance, gradually becoming the foundation of my artistic practice.
It is not the material world that first captures my attention, but what shines through the surface—the inner life. I am drawn to what cannot be depicted directly, yet can still be sensed. In a way, I find myself trying to see through the canvas I paint on, reaching for something beyond it. It is an impossible pursuit, perhaps even a paradox, since the surface itself is my medium. And yet, that is where my painting begins.
I often think of my work as a search for the subject within the object. A person is never merely a motif. Each carries a history, an inner life, and a gaze that meets our own. In my portrait series Subject/50%, in which I portrayed women around the age of 75, the encounter itself became part of the work. Through conversations, sketches, painting and photographs, the portraits emerged from a relationship rather than from observation alone.
I also find it difficult to think of time as linear. To me, existence is movement. Everything changes, transforms, and continues to become. Movement is therefore one of the central themes in my work. I am drawn to the movement of water, the human body, the shifting nature of relationships, and the continuous dance of the natural world. In series such as After, Iron Water, and Hold On and Let Go, I explore transformation as both condition and possibility—a place where loss and hope often coexist.
Colour is my most instinctive language. It carries emotions that words cannot always reach. Through colour, I seek a state where joy, sorrow, longing, and melancholy can exist simultaneously. Perhaps this is part of a Nordic inheritance—the melancholy that lives in the luminous summer nights as much as in the stillness of winter. Yet melancholy is never darkness to me. It is a space where tenderness, stillness, and joy can also reside.
I am driven by the belief that we are not separate from nature but part of it. That our lives are deeply intertwined, and that hope remains as long as we remember this connection. In my painting, I strive to work with honesty and presence, allowing intuition, colour, and movement to guide me while continually returning to the questions that have accompanied me throughout my life.
Ultimately, it is my own life that nourishes my artistic practice. It is where I find the experiences, relationships, and existential questions that sustain my work. Painting is my way of exploring them—not to arrive at answers, but to continue seeing, listening, and wondering.
What does it mean to exist?
Featured Works of Carina Söderström
ABOUT Teresa Guadalupe Olds
Teresa Guadalupe Olds is a painter born in Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico and based in Queens, New York. She works primarily in oil, building figurative and architectural environments from memory, intuition, and spiritual fascination. Her paintings, characterized by saturated color and luminous light, render personal mythology and interior states as immersive spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and otherworldly.
She received her BFA in Fine Arts with a minor in Art History from Ringling College of Art and Design (2023), and her MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, The New School (2025).
Her work has been exhibited in New York City, Florida, and Mexico, including Re:Turning at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery (New York, 2025). Her work was also featured in Hyperallergic in “Parsons Fine Arts MFA Students Help Us Navigate 2025” (2025).
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work dismantles colonial instruments of perception; what we are taught as truth, and what gets suppressed in the process. The camera (the reproducible fact) is the ultimate expression of western epistemology, measuring surfaces and imposing itself as truth. My paintings proceed from a different understanding: felt experience and spiritual perception yield a more accurate account of reality than optics. Rendering a moment in its magnitude is not sentimentality or fantasy but correction. It’s not a stylistic preference but an epistemological commitment.
Abandoning the photograph was the same decolonial act as learning to see myself through my own eyes and evicting a way of knowing that was never mine. Growing up Mexican and impoverished, I concealed my heritage, survived leukemia, underwent an ayahuasca ceremony with my shaman aunt, and told no one. Concealment became habitual, then subconscious, then structural; a condition shared by many whose interiority has been shaped by displacement, poverty, and assimilation into a culture that demands erasure as the price of survival.
My father’s recent death expanded this framework; the same visual language built for spiritual transformation was already waiting to receive grief. Personal mythology makes possible the capacity to receive the full weight of an experience and render its truth rather than surface appearance. This is not idealization. It is the same epistemological commitment I began with, applied now to its most personal subject. I am seeing clearly, perhaps for the first time, through a lens that is entirely my own.
