ArtBeat
Mark Soltero, The Projection Room
Warren Feeney
Mark Soltero is a Christchurch-based artist who grew up on San Francisco and The Projection Room takes its subject from his childhood experiences of popular cinema, his minimalist blackened stencil imagery of a theatre interior, rendering it from the entrance to seating and screen. It’s a dominating, yet fragile representation of this arena for popular entertainment as it was more than 50 years ago.
Like many of his works from the past decade, Soltera’s paintings embody a figurative memory of the world that comes close to pure abstraction. The seating and big screen in The Projection Room is about memory and the experience of cinema as a space for community gatherings, sound and vision, surfaces and materials, recalling an encounter of a particular environment as personal as it is shared by all.
Yet, Soltero’s art isn’t there to sentimentally dwell on the past. Rather it is his attention to the materials of his practice and his processes; the scale of his work and the painterly, printed surfaces of his woollen canvases, resisting and embracing the acrylic paint imbedded by the pressure of the artist’s hand onto its surfaces that draw the gallery visitor into an encounter in the present and a consciousness that The Projection Room itself, becomes its own moment of realisation and memory.
Mark Soltero, The Projection Room
Chambers Gallery
241 Moorhouse Avenue
30 July - 17 August
IMAGE
- Mark Soltera, Fragmentary View of the Projection Room, 2018, acrylic on wool, 1900 x 1500mm