How does one inhabit a space they’ve never been to, or contemplate a memory from a life they have not lived? Adriel Visoto’s practice, comprised mainly of tenderly rendered oil paintings, aims to answer this question through a series of meticulously composed vignettes. While Visoto’s paintings all share a cinematic quality, the body of work presented in Solitude Souvenirs utilizes direct quotations from American cinema, set in New York City, to convey melancholic atmospheres which prompt reflection on notions of intimacy, anonymity, and collective memory.

Drawing from a broad range of filmic sources, such as Taxi Driver (1977) and After Hours (1985) by Martin Scorsese, as well as Kids (1995) by Larry Clark to name a few, Visoto’s paintings channel the zeitgeist of New York City to ruminate on feelings of isolation and longing; all within composite spaces the artist has never physically occupied. Through this cinematically inspired breed of world-building, Visoto intentionally blurs faces or presents his subject with their back turned, leaving ample room for the viewer to project their personal histories onto the scene. The formal differences of meticulous brushwork and abstracted identities reveal and meditate upon the overlapping qualities of the individual and the universal.

Notably, these vivid environments are contained in an approachable scale, often only an inch or two larger than a standard postcard, a comparison that alludes to the souvenir element in the title of the series. The context of global surveillance materializes this condition somewhat literally when one thinks of comparing the paintings smoothly primed surfaces to a screen. The transient, momentary images Visoto depicts in Solitude Souvenirs exist as odes to the experience afforded by thinking about lives we have not ourselves led- the interior worlds of people we do not know, yet can see ourselves in.

– Dana Notine

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