Some fashion and museum news to start this dispatch off; Burberry has partnered with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to renovate the institution's Fashion Gallery. The space will re-open in 2027 as The Burberry Gallery, naturally. I'm very curious to see how this will translate into the programming as the V&A is known for its style-centric blockbusters; and I would love to see more adventurous fare like the Tate Modern's current Leigh Bowery exhibition at the space! Side note: I've been thinking a lot about Leigh as I've been writing a story about eccentric dressing for The Globe and Mail – coming soon and I will keep you posted.
And now to the main event. This week's newsletter highlights an interview with a wonderful local artist, Luca Soldovieri. Her current show, Open it Like a Letter, Read it Like a Window, at Olga Korper Gallery is an unbelievable study in materiality and narrative. Soldovieri captures elusive moments in hazy monochromes, employing incredible ingredients from perfume bottles to rain boots which the artist has determinedly ground down in order to paint with.
Read on to find out more about Luca's practice and these hauntingly beautiful paintings; and if you're free this afternoon, she's in conversation with artist Meaghan Hyckie at Olga Korper Gallery at 3pm!
Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Luca Soldovieri’s exhibition at Olga Korper Gallery is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. At first glance, each of her paintings’ spectral scenes call you closer with a kind of soft enchantment; what you’re looking at isn’t always obscure, but there’s a persistent sense of phantasy throughout each work that makes them alluringly esoteric. Uncomplicated colourways, made so due to the nature of Soldovieri’s painterly materials, deepen their mystery. And once you dig into these details, you discover an astounding assemblage of elements and ideas.
Open it Like a Letter, Read it Like a Windowis Soldovieri’s second solo exhibition at OKG, her first featuring an array of arresting architectural paintings composed of dust and adhesive on panel. Soldovieri takes this extraordinary exploration of materiality even further in her current show, combining all manner of ingredients from receipts to eyelashes to shoes, hair strands and asphalt that have been ground down by the artist’s own hand. Once in this fine form, for the most part these objects end up contributing a cloudy greyscale to her painterly palette. And these rich components are annotated alongside each painting like a poem, cryptic and compelling.
Soldovieri says she started to understand the narrative potential in sanding objects to collect their powdery matter a few years ago; and in this show, she moves between grinding down the things that surround her and items she sourced online, and even family heirlooms, to concoct her medium of choice.
The exhibition’s text notes that “[S]he brings these materials into relationship with one another as a form of storytelling. When placed in context together, they take on additional meaning and form an image that is felt or intuited rather than seen: the headlight of a car, the guardrail of a highway, the passenger seatbelt, the fibers of the t-shirt it rests against, and the locket beneath it.”
Luca Soldovieri, Open it Like a Letter, Read it Like a Window, installation view. Photography by Laura Findlay.
Soldovieri walked me through the richly layered storytelling within the exhibition just before it opened, outlining the nuances and granular details of the works in a way that made them feel more real and yet even more uncanny. And though I’d never been to the places depicted in the works here – her grandparents’ backyard, or a German monastary’s courtyard fountain – the ambiguous way in which they’re rendered makes them more like movie scenes I can set my own silent stories against.
“The relationships between the images and their corresponding material lists vary from work to work,” the exhibition text continues. “The connections range from elements as concrete as a shared location to as fragile as a single word. The tenuousness of these connections alludes to a relationship between things—past and present, place and memory—that does not belong to language.”
Luca Soldovieri, Solitaire, 2025. Adhesive and powdered material (sliding door handle, glass, concrete, slippers, balcony railing, feather, dust, folding table, playing cards) on panel. 30 x 40 inches. Photography by Laura Findlay.
We’re starting off by looking at the work Just Out Back, which has garden bench and rain boots listed in the materials you used to make the piece. How do these things make their way physically into your work?
They’re mostly sourced from my life, but I also spent a lot of time on eBay and in vintage stores, because I prefer using something that's pre-owned. I sand them down with sandpaper by hand, which is a very involved process. There are things like the rain boots, which I can bring back to my studio and work with, and then there's things like the garden bench, which is in my parents’ backyard. In these cases, I'm visiting the site where a material source is and I'm taking off a little bit of it.
And how long does it take you to grind down these materials?
It varies, but anything made of metal is quite tough. The piece Still There Somewhere has car tire in it, which sounds easy because it's rubber. But they’re not made to wear down! One of my bright ideas [laughs].
Making life hard for yourself – the artist’s way! What comes next after all this material is collected?
By the time I get to the actual making of the painting, I've spent so much time sanding and the stencils that I use are very precise – I wouldn't say it’s effortless, but it's like I've learned a lot of choreography and now I just have to do the dance, if that makes sense.
Luca Soldovieri, Just Out Back, 2025. Adhesive and powdered material (soil, clover, garden bench, rain boots, envelope, stamp, ‘Returned to Sender’ sticker, ruled paper, ballpoint ink, 4 x 6 inch photo prints) on panel. 30 x 40 inches. Photography by Laura Findlay.
Totally. How are these elements – the materials that you're working with – in harmony with the themes of the pieces?
It’s a new process for me, so it was interesting to figure that out. It's some cross between writing a story and coming up with an image. When you go through the material list for Just Out Back, for example, it's set in a garden. There’s an envelope and a stamp, and a sticker that says “Return to Sender”. So, it’s implied that this letter didn't arrive where it was meant to arrive. It lends to a sense of longing – a little bit of regret, maybe. But the relationship between the image and the materials varies throughout the show, painting by painting. Because I'm really thinking about what it is to be like physically in one place and in every other way, somewhere completely different.
It's interesting too because the window in this work isn’t totally closed, but not totally open. The “Return to Sender” sticker kind of takes on a bit of a different meaning there.
I like that the connection between the materials list and the painting is tenuous and not totally concrete, because that's sort of how it feels to have a memory triggered.
Speaking of memories, your work has a very enigmatic spirit to it. It feels out of time and place, and it's very transportive in a memory versus tangible way. That’s especially true in the blurrier works in the exhibition.
The counterpart to Just Out Back (2025), called Farther Back (2025), is something I made part way through the production of this show. I was feeling a lot of tension between the sharpness of the images I was using and the dreamy quality of the materials. So I started blurring my reference images using a Gaussian Blur technique. I was thinking about the blurring between interior and exterior worlds, and where you are in the present versus everything that's coming from the past.
Luca Soldovieri, Farther Back, 2025. Adhesive and powdered material (soil, clover, garden bench, rain boots, envelope, stamp, ‘Returned to Sender’ sticker, ruled paper, ballpoint ink, 4 x 6 inch photo prints) on panel. 30 x 40 inches. Photography by Laura Findlay.
It's so exciting to see how these materials come together to create such an evocative space where you're kind of like, ‘What am I looking at?’ as the viewer.
The objects individually have meaning, and they're brought into context with one another to make something that’s greater than the sum of its parts – where there’s a story that emerges that is pulled from inside these objects, taking them apart and putting them together in a different way.
And I love the differences in scale. Why were you interested in the zoom in and zoom out effects you use here?
There’s something about giving significance to something really small by pairing it with something big; maybe not giving, but pointing out the significance that I see in those things.
Luca Soldovieri’s Open it Like a Letter, Read it Like a Window is on until April 26th at Olga Korper Gallery.
3 To See
Newly opened exhibitions I'm excited to check out
The Spinner The Dealer The Assassin, featuring paintings by Margaux Smith and textile work by Heather Goodchild along with a collaborative installation by the two; on at Clint Roenisch Gallery
Together in Quiet Light, featuring the multidisciplinary work of Holly Chang, Isabelle Parson, Chiedza Pasipanodya, and Alexandre Pépin; on at Zalucky Contemporary
Continuum, featuring pieces by Sheridan College's Ceramics graduates (below is an example of the work – a piece called The Cool Kids by Jaxx Bonner); on at Craft Ontario
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