Daniel Soltero "Painted Apocalyptic Ponies" Triptych Acrylic on Canvas, 2025

A three-panel acrylic on canvas composition by Daniel Soltero, the Harvard-trained urban designer and abstract painter based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Titled Painted Apocalyptic Ponies and dated 2025, the work translates Soltero's architectural vocabulary — interlocking arcs, hard-edged geometric ribbons, layered planes of saturated color — into a frieze-like procession of painted ponies thundering across a smoke-grey ground line.

The herd numbers roughly fifteen horses across the three panels, each rendered with ledger-art sensibility: feathered war bonnets, beaded breast collars, painted flanks marked with stars and dotted ceremonial patterns, and draped blankets in geometric weave designs. One horse — white, skeletal, ribs and spine fully articulated — strides mid-herd in the rightmost panel, its yellow-striped bones luminous against the grey smoke ground. The horses' hooves churn through a low band of grey-painted cloud or dust, with flashes of red and orange breaking through at the ground line, as though the earth beneath them is lit or burning. Above the procession, Soltero's architectural overlay dominates: concentric arcs in blue, red, yellow, orange, and green sweep across all three canvases in continuous bands, interrupted and crossed by angular, hard-edged forms — stepped rectangles, diagonal slashes, and flat geometric planes — that read less as landscape than as a constructed cosmological space collapsing around the herd. The color palette is fully saturated throughout, with no atmospheric softening; grey functions as the structural neutral against which every other hue fires at full intensity. The three panels read as a single continuous narrative when hung together, the architectural overlay threading from one canvas to the next with deliberate compositional continuity. Each panel is signed lower right with Soltero's "D" cipher; the work is signed, titled, and dated in full on the verso. Presented in a black floater frame that unifies the three canvases as one work.

About the Artist

Daniel Soltero holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His professional practice spans El Paso, San Diego, Granada, and Doha, with international design competition entries ranging from the World Trade Center Site to the Atlanta Olympics, the IX Biennale in Florence, and projects in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Yokohama, Shenzhen, Lagos, and Kazan. Honors include the Alliance Française (Houston), the Daniel Libeskind Honors Studio at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, and scholarships from Harvard, Alliance Française, the National Hispanic Association, and Schlumberger. His painting practice draws from indigenous cultures, folklore, and the legends of peoples worldwide, processed through a designer's structural sensibility. Paintings are held in private collections in Las Cruces, Phoenix, Goodyear, and Saint Louis. An artist biography card accompanies the lot.

CONDITION

Very Good. Paper dust cover on the verso is torn. Painted surfaces are clean and presentation in the floater frame is sound.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Artist: Daniel Soltero (Las Cruces, New Mexico)
• Title: Painted Apocalyptic Ponies
• Date: 2025
• Medium: Acrylic on canvas
• Format: Triptych (three panels)
• Signed: Lower right on each panel; signed, titled, and dated verso
• Framing: Black floater frame
• Overall (framed): 22 7/8" H × 64 3/8" W × 2 3/8" D
• Each Panel: 20" × 20"
• Includes: Artist biography card