Bosco Sodi (born 1970 in Mexico City, based in Barcelona and Berlin) is showing a new site-specific wallpiece, 400 x 1200 cm in size, the largest to date created by the artist using more than 500 kg of materials. In the tradition of the Mexican muralists this wallpiece probably is the biggest made by a contemporary Mexican artist outside his native home.
The work was recently made in the Uferstudios, the former main warehouse of the Berlin Public Transport Company (BVG) and will be inaugurated at the gallery during the Gallery Weekend Berlin from may 1 til 3, a time when many important collectors, museum directors and art lovers will come to town.
Sodi's art permeates the sphere where nature merges with man, creating a sense of materialised beauty, and a powerfully affective or emotional impact on the viewer. His large-scale paintings of vivid colours derived from various organic materials mediate a space between painting and relief. The works possess a powerful sense of optical modulation, an organic beauty that evokes a sense of a visual binary, an oscillating foreground to background, ridge to groove, shadow to light. As the viewer resolves and gradually comprehends the non-representational imagery within their personal lexicon, visual associations and rich textures of colourful fabrics hanging in the marketplace or the sculpted surfaces of earthen walls in Latin America begin to emerge. With deliberate allusions to the synaesthesic conditions of a sensory interplay, Sodi's aim is to conflate colour and material in an informal and non-oppositional manner. The artist states, "the colour must make a sound", in short it must resonate, and his choices of bright colours allows the viewer to experience his works in a multi-corporeal sense. One's feelings are quite literally in continual translation from one sensation to another. Emphasizing the use of natural materials, and working without brushes, Sodi builds up his layers over the canvas support with wood pulp, sawdust, fibres derived from different sources such as jute, as well as pigments, and the traditional Mexican dye cochineal (the insect dye originates from Aztec and Mayan culture, and Oaxaca, Mexico, retained the monopoly of production until after the War of Independence 1810-1821), glue and iron dust. The result is an organic topology that extends through various layers of paint, creating an outcome that surpasses the simple materiality of its components. Due to their size and material make-up an ambient and incidental light continually activates and transforms Sodi's images, meaning that the paintings no longer remain as static works.
Bosco Sodi's art has been influenced by a wide spectrum of artists that include Rothko, Kandinsky and Malevich. He especially admires Antoni Tapies for his ability to impart a human and spiritual sense to his works through their material properties. Sodi's works similarly succeed in achieving a heightened sense of the spiritual through their transcendence of the materials he uses.
The artist had solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Tokio, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona and Mexico City among others. His works are found in major private collections around the world.
The exhibition Organic Blue is kindly supported by the Mexican Embassy in Berlin.