N.A.S.A.L. presents Mullu, the first solo-show of Teo Monsalve in Mexico City.
Teo Monsalve (Quito, Ecuador, 1988) holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His work blends traditional media—painting, drawing, and printmaking—with technologies such as AI and computer-aided design. His research centers on the natural world and the pre-Columbian past, approached through speculative fiction and interdisciplinary dialogue. By combining narratives from natural history and the history of painting, he creates intersections between myth and science. Monsalve has exhibited in Ecuador, Canada, the United States, France, and Mexico, and has presented five solo shows. He received an honorable mention at the Premio Brasil (2020) and the Mariano Aguilera Prize (2022). He is currently the Visual Arts program coordinator at USFQ in Quito.
" Teo’s artistic practice sits on the threshold between myth and reality. Driven by a deep interest in the layered material memory shared between Mexico and Ecuador, he conducted extensive historical research to trace connections between the two regions. From this, he constructs a personal fiction, retracing the paths of imagined voyages. With a dose of sci-fi, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing, Monsalve gives form to the visions that sparked this exhibition: a raft emerging from a cabuya paper mural—a thick skin-like surface that, in his words, becomes a metaphor for the skin of the Americas. This vessel carries cacao, coca leaf, ají, metals, and agave. It also transports the eagle, the jaguar, and the serpent—emblems of identity shared by both Mexico and Ecuador. The flow of images Teo envisioned even led him to map the celestial dome under which this vessel travels, resulting in Mapa náutico. In this work, he appropriates and transforms the constellations Orpheus and Serpens—as defined by Johann Bayer for navigating between the Northern and Southern hemispheres in his Uranometria star atlas—to construct a more localized sky, a new cosmos where Cacao and Spondylus are now part of the firmament. (...) "
Exhbition text by Karla Niño De Rivera