Pérez y Requena: A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth

Pérez y Requena explore overlooked dimensions of the city—particularly their native Santa Cruz de Tenerife– approaching it as a fragmentary and restless archive of memory, territory, fiction and visual culture. Their methodology intertwines research and production, forging connections between sculpture and drawing, urban drift and installation.

Co-curated with Néstor Delgado Morales (Curator Temporary Exhibitions, TEA), “A Parrot, Three Bars, and Gold Teeth” is conceived for TEA’s Sala C. The exhibition’s title condenses a landscape into a brief, seemingly disjointed statement that invites associations rather than articulating a closed narrative. It emerges from the dérives and archives that Pérez y Requena have developed over decades around the area now occupied by the TEA museum on the bank of the Santos ravine, a site built upon a world that imagined its future differently. Once associated with travelling shows, bars and clandestine encounters, this territory was subsequently disrupted by processes of urban regeneration. Whilst maintaining an open character, the exhibition proposes a possible reading of these long-term processes.

The exhibition has taken shape through the artists’ persistent wanderings, through rumours and documentary traces; an approach to both real places and the ghosts of a displaced imagination, as well as to ways of life and urban uses that have been progressively demolished and forgotten.

The materials, techniques, and images brought together – including discarded photographs, architectural echoes and obsolete patterns – function as vignettes, partial scenes and residual fragments that evoke other times and geographies. Through strategies of copying, erasure, montage, distortion and annotation, these compositions do not seek to illustrate or fix meaning, but rather to make an absence perceptible.

Drawing, understood as a method situated between lived experience and knowledge, introduces tensions and enables a reading of what remains inscribed at the margins. What appears here emerges from the friction between straight and sinuous lines, between the space of memory and the passage of time, which shapes and transforms recurring ideas, desires, and nightmares.

Israel Pérez and María Requena (b. 1975 and 1978) both graduated in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna in 2000, later completing Diplomas of Advanced Studies in Painting at the same institution, where they now also teach. Their work has featured in group exhibitions including “Nudos y enredos 2/5”, Círculo de Bellas Artes de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2025–26); “Pintura enojada”, Travesía Cuatro, Mexico City (2024–25); “Concretos”, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León (2022–23); and “No news, good news”, CAAM Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2019). Recent solo shows include: “Conquistador”, Galería BIBLI, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2022) and “The Fall”, Sala de Arte Contemporáneo, Santa Cruz de Tenerife (2017).