In the exhibition Afterimage, Ōtautahi Christchurch artist Mark Soltero contemplates the cinema as an autobiographical site of memory making, and as a metaphor for the processes of recollection and reimagination.
Nine Fathom Deep presents a selection of large and small-scale paintings, on paper and fabric, from a body of work Soltero has been working on since 2017.
Childhood memories of neighbourhood cinemas, often visited while growing up in San Francisco, form the departure point for this body of work by Soltero. There is both a distinct material process and a poetic imaginary at play – as the photograph of a historic cinema space itself becomes the site of exploration: the artist deconstructs the architectural features of the auditorium, by splitting and splicing image layers, separating and overlaying in iterative cycles, until what remains are abstracted traces of darkness and light.
Afterimage re-stages the cinematic space within the gallery, as ‘Cinema of the Rorschach’, suspended in the centre, separates the brighter ‘auditorium’ like a projection screen from the penumbrae of ‘backstage’.
Soltero’s limited palette and permeable, soft fabrics play at the cinematic convention of the flashback indicating a past tense: in black and white, with blurred edges and focus. His paintings echo the continuous process of change in remembering, as every re-telling is also a re-visioning: with each iteration, the original image drifts further away in darker refractions. As cyphers beyond de-coding, these works tug at us gently from behind the scenes.
