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Exhibit: Rafael Soldi: Soft Boy at the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk)
August 4 - November 1
Seattle-based artist Rafael Soldi (American, b. Peru 1987) works with photography and video to examine how personal identity is shaped within socio-political frameworks, including immigration, memory, and loss. Drawn from his own experience growing up queer in Peru, Soldi’s work explores the performance of masculinity in Latin American society.
Soft Boy (2023), an immersive three-channel video installation, investigates the way gender norms are encoded and potentially disrupted through language, ritual, and childhood games. Presented in a nonlinear format, the video follows a group of uniformed schoolboys reenacting rituals inspired by Soldi’s memories of attending an all-boys Catholic school in Peru. The adolescents engage in schoolyard fighting, military-style marching, and exaggerated displays of athleticism, rehearsing a model of masculinity rooted in discipline, hierarchy, and the normalization of violence. Through pacing, repetition, and close attention to bodily contact, Soldi complicates these familiar codes, framing the boy’s machismo as both menacing and faintly absurd.
In Soft Boy, masculinity is shown not as a fixed or natural state, but as a learned performance. By revisiting these formative rituals, Soldi opens a space to consider how softness, care, and queerness persist within and against rigid masculine norms.
