Soler puts his brushes aside and takes up the camera for this exhibition. He presents a series of photographs that features everyday pedestrian scenery and breathes new life to the otherwise mundane facades that we often take for granted—like a visual diary or a compilation of day-to-day studies in composition. At first glance, they seem to merely focus on the study of random forms and surfaces textures, repeating lines, shapes, and colors. In this urban geometry, the photographs acquire an abstracted flatness; yet from his fragmentary frames of nameless streets, we encounter the familiar alongside the alien, the strange, and the new.

With enough discernment, we can recognize a society’s inherent nature, and from its detritus, we deduce the whole topology of urban entropy and decay: the things that are discarded or thrown away, or the things that are preserved. These are the seemingly insignificant details that betray a larger realm in Soler’s photographs. The streaks of graffiti on pebbled ground, the flaking pigments on tiled terraces, the rainbow oil stains on asphalt, a thrown cigarette stub on a cobbled street—all are relevant pieces of a complex mosaic.

Soler has dabbled in photography for almost as long as he has been painting, and he chanced upon this series serendipitously when his wayward shadow cast itself within the camera's viewfinder and intruded on his compositions. This has somehow altered the direction and discourse of his photographs. Otherwise devoid of human presence, the quiet solitude of his portraits are disrupted by the recurring silhouette of the artist as the shadow itself becomes its own subject matter—enamored, like narcissus, by its cast reflection. Uncannily, the arms that cradle the camera seem to suggest the cartoonish outline of an open eye and inadvertently become a symbol for the omnipresent, all-seeing, roving eye of the artist: perpetually looking for clues, constantly reconnoitering and assessing his environment.

Etched on the ground by the late morning sun, the outlined figure somehow recalls the romantic, allegorical paintings of another era which typically portray silhouetted figures beholding or contemplating expansive landscapes. But whereas these paintings depict the figures as almost insignificant in proportion to the vast panoramic vistas, the scale in Soler’s photographs is less daunting: reduced to the almost-miniscule details, yet no less in revelry of its being. They call attention to moments of commonplace miracles that constantly take place around us but we remain oblivious to and are testimonies of reverence and awe for the divine and for the sheer existence of beauty amidst the artifice of urban landscape.

There is a hint of nostalgia in Soler’s imagery that is perhaps unintentional and more of a personal journey, but the series inevitably summons images of the artist’s old works. Soler gained recognition early in his career with his seminal Leaves series, a compendium of botanically faithful watercolor portraits of fallen leaves and vegetation, where the artist alluded to the hidden natural processes of the earth, depicting the rich organic leaf litter of the forest floor as it is reintegrated back into nature’s perpetual cycles. In his photographically accurate renditions, the topology of landscape is intuited by the rich diversity of its decomposing substrate. Yet there is also an element of symbolism that seeks a subjective, emotional response to the natural world.

And there is a sort of homecoming-feel in this series of photographs: several decades hence, his photographic studies seem to look back at the remote past with a more sober, but no less poetic, assessment of urban encroachment. What once was a wonderland of youth is now lost and buried under the pavement; old landscapes give way to urban structures and poured concrete, and Soler’s photographs seem bent on unearthing traces of that irretrievable past.

Ultimately, the final pieces are the result of a fine line between choice and chance, of intuitive selection and self-censorship, and of impulses guided by a series of specific yet random confluences of circumstance that lead to moments that, at another time, would not have caught the artist’s attention—he may come across the same subject again under the same light and the same angle, but the critical moment has passed; intangible elements conspire, and the moment is no longer deemed worthy of capturing. Something has elapsed, and it’s the elusive, unquantifiable substance that the artist trains his eye to pursue and immortalize on canvas.

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