Seattle artist Rafael Soldi uses photographic media to examine the intersection of individual identity with larger political and social themes such as immigration, memory, and loss. The artist’s current work builds on his experience as a queer youth in Peru to focus on the construction of masculinity in Latin American society. Soft Boy , Soldi’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast, brings together three recent projects that explore how gender expectations are encoded—and can be subverted—within language and childhood games.  

The core of the exhibition is a new immersive video installation, Soft Boy (2023), Soldi’s ambitious first foray into moving-image work. The nonlinear video follows a group of uniformed, school-aged adolescents as they perform a series of rituals drawn from the artist’s memories of his days at an all-boys Catholic school. Schoolyard brawling, marching in military-style parades, arm wrestling, performative athleticism: the depicted actions index a type of masculinity largely governed by violence. Soldi’s treatment, however, frames the boys’ machismo as both threatening and absurd, barely concealing an urgent need for intimacy and connection. 

The exhibition also includes selections from the artist’s print series CARGAMONTÓN (2022) and a new hand-written text installation, mouth to mouth (2023). “Cargamontón,” a pile-on form of hazing common in Latin American schools, hovers in Soldi’s recollection between bullying and homoerotic self-discovery. The artist translates pixelated found footage of the practice into a sequence of elegant large-scale etchings, which evoke obscure memory and an ambiguous mix of pain and pleasure. In mouth to mouth , Soldi again centers moments of fluidity and dissonance, presenting word plays and Spanish-English pairings that reveal the gendered power structures built into language and the slipperiness of meaning. For the artist, probing states of in-betweenness—especially as it occurs across tongues—provides nuanced insight into immigrant identity while also offering a rich metaphor for queer experience. 

An artist and curator, Rafael Soldi (born 1987, Lima, Peru) holds a BFA in Photography and Curatorial Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Soldi has exhibited internationally, including at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami; the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; ClampArt Gallery, New York; the Print Center, Philadelphia; Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; Filter Space, Chicago; and Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, Canada, among others. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tacoma Art Museum; the Frye Art Museum; King County Public Art Collection, Seattle; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 

Boren Banner Series: Rafael Soldi
OCTOBER 07, 2023 - APRIL 07, 2024

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy , this iteration of the Boren Banner Series features an image from the artist’s new body of work, Mientras el cielo gire (As long as the sky whirls) . The project is based on Soldi’s research into the Peruvian Havana Embassy Crisis of 1980 and the ensuing Mariel Boatlift, a massive flotilla of private vessels that brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to the United States and a thousand to the artist’s native Peru. At the time, homosexuality was criminalized in Cuba, punishable by imprisonment and hard labor. An estimated 20,000 of those who fled the country in 1980 were gay.

Soldi’s interest in the historic event developed out of the inadvertent role his homeland played, he says, “as a gateway to queer liberation, despite its long history with homophobia.” The banner image is drawn from one of many photographs taken by the artist at newspaper archives in Lima. By abstracting his subject through cropping and enlargement, Soldi aims to “transform an ostensibly neutral journalistic account into one laden with suggestion and desire, with a gaze toward a queer body veiled in the chaos of mass exile.”

The series title comes from  a poem Reinaldo Arenas  (1943–1990) wrote to his lover in New York City, after he escaped Cuba and shortly before he contracted HIV. For Soldi, the project centers on personal queer narratives like Areanas’s that stream below the surface of public accounts: the real people for whom, as Areanas writes in his memoir, “there’s just one place to live—the impossible.”

The Boren Banner Series is a public art initiative by the Frye Art Museum that reflects the museum’s commitment to showcasing work by Pacific Northwest artists. Presented biannually, the series gives regional artists the opportunity to create new site-specific work or show a previously unexhibited piece as a monumental, 16 x 20 ft. vinyl banner. The billboard-size work is prominently sited facing Boren Avenue, the Frye’s most visible and accessible physical interface.