Mark Soltero

Cinématic Forms of Light and Shadow

In essence my paintings are history paintings that examine relationships between image, memory and materiality. Many of the images border on dissolution, fragmenting or breaking down in contrast to the seemingly smooth images that saturate our lived experience. Rather than making works in which the image might be shocking, I want to make works that draw audiences in, yet are challenging to look at. To a certain extent, the work explores our experience of différance, in time.

Recently I’ve been using a combination of reflective metallic paints and dense light-absorbing black. The shapes are the result of mining the interiors of particular cinema spaces, slicing through the layers of the light and shadow in the image like an onion, revealing fragmentary patterns. The patterns are abstract but they were absolutely real at a particular point in time. I’m researching ideas related to mirrors – the refraction of light firstly in the photograph, then echoed through its projection over the internet and again when processed in a computer, the reflective paint, the doubling of the image to create the Rorschach effect and finally the fact that when we view abstract images we project our own thoughts onto them, and interpret what we’re seeing. 

The work presents a pictorial space that provides a stimulus for audiences to imagine and make associations with their own visual memories and experiences. Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, where meaning is differed/deferred, can be considered in terms of the act of thinking which necessarily involves association, memory, prediction, assumption, anticipation…we literally move between associations. It’s that space of our interior world I’m exploring.

Sharon Johnson