Daniel Soltero "Horizons #2" Large-Scale Abstract Acrylic on Canvas, Las Cruces, 2025

A bold, architecturally composed abstract by Daniel Soltero — Harvard GSD-trained urban designer, international competition architect, and abstract painter based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Titled Horizons #2, the work divides its 36-inch square canvas into a saturated cadmium-red upper field and a softly dragged silver-grey lower register. At the right, a deep black rectangle — doorway, monolith, threshold — descends from the red field through the horizon line and into the grey below, breaching the boundary between the two zones and anchoring the entire composition at that crossing point. A dark red disc ringed in gold floats in the upper left, positioned on a cross-hair axis formed by two thin yellow-gold lines: one extending horizontally through the disc itself, the other running through the grey field below. Together the two lines insist on the picture plane as landscape even as the geometry resists easy resolution. Ghosted arcs and angular forms pressed into the impasto of the red field suggest architectural elevations or topographic contours — legible only as light rakes across the surface.

Soltero builds his surfaces with deliberate physicality. The red ground is worked in sweeping, swirling impasto passages that hold the memory of the gesture. The grey field is laid in with smoother drag marks — quieter, more atmospheric, suggesting earth, stone, or the flat light before a storm. The black rectangle absorbs both, its hand-built edges carrying flecks of deep blue that only surface on close reading. The three zones function less as sky, wall, and ground than as distinct psychological registers held in tension by the horizon lines threading between them — a painter's problem solved with an architect's spatial logic. Signed and documented in the artist's hand on the verso: "Horizons #2 / 36" × 36", Acrylic on Canvas / Dan Soltero, 2025 / Las Cruces, New Mexico" with monogram.

Daniel Soltero holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received the Harvard University Scholarship and trained in the Honors Studio under Daniel Libeskind. His professional practice has taken him across El Paso, San Diego, Granada, and Doha, and his competition record spans six continents — including the World Trade Center Site Competition, the Atlanta International Olympic Design Competition, Vietnam Memorial commissions in both El Paso and Suffolk County, and invited entries in Florence, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Seville, Amsterdam, Yokohama, Shenzhen, Lagos, and Kazan. He has exhibited at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and at Jonas Burger's artist village on Lehderstrasse, Berlin. His paintings are held in private collections in Las Cruces, Phoenix, Goodyear, and Saint Louis. His deepest local institutional engagement is the Camino Real Historic Development Commission in Doña Ana, New Mexico — and Horizons #2, created in Las Cruces in 2025, carries both the landscape light and the spatial thinking that run through all of his work.

Collectors drawn to the intersection of architectural abstraction and studio painting — those who follow the lineage from Malevich and de Stijl through Luis Barragán's color field architecture and into contemporary geometric abstraction — will find Soltero's work operating in serious company. His training places him in a very specific conversation: where built form, landscape, and the psychology of space meet the painted surface. Horizons #2 is a large-format statement work at a price point that remains well below comparable works by established figures in architectural abstraction — and it comes with full documentation, regional provenance, and a competition and exhibition record that supports long-term value.

CONDITION

Excellent. Fresh from the studio with no abrasions, soiling, or handling marks. Impasto texture and surface variation throughout the red field are intentional to the artist's technique and are not damage.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall: 36" H × 36" W × 1⅜" D
• Medium: Acrylic on canvas
• Artist: Daniel Soltero (active Las Cruces, NM)
• Title: Horizons #2
• Date: 2025
• Signed: Verso, in the artist's hand, with monogram
• Includes: Printed artist biography card affixed to verso stretcher
• Framing: Unframed; gallery-wrapped stretcher