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Bosco Sodi, born 1970 in Mexico and now living in Barcelona and Berlin, shows new organic works at Kai Hilgemann. Sodi’s art circulates in the spheres where nature and man merge, creating beauty beneath demise, creating an inescapable emotional impact on the viewer. Three variations on his theme are presented at this falls show at the gallery.
His large-scale paintings of vivid colours based on various materials are reliefs of deep organic beauty containing oscillating binaries of foreground and background, ridge and groove, shadow and light. As the viewer resolves the non-representational imagery within a personal lexicon, visual associations with the rich textures of colorful fabrics hanging in the marketplace and the sculpted surfaces of earthen walls in Latin America emerge. With allusions to synaesthesia, Sodi's goals are to conflate color and material in an informal and nonoppositional manner. The artist states, "the color must make a sound" and his choices of bright colors allow the viewer to experience the works in senses other than merely the visual, transporting them to other places. Emphasizing the use of natural materials, often working without brushes, Sodi builds up his vertical striations over board or canvas with wood pulp, sawdust, wood fibers derived from different woods, including ute, as well as pigments, including cochinilla, glue, and iron dust; the resultant organic topology is then covered in a thick layer of paint, creating an object that supercedes ist components. Due to the thickness of the work, quotidian ambient and incidental light activate and continually transform the images, and the paintings no longer remain static works. "To make things pleasant and to be contemplated, that is the aim of my work" (Bosco Sodi).
Also on display are works from his new series BOTANICA. These fragile paintings consist of selected accentuations of silicon delicately applied on pages taken from a botanic picture-book by famous belgian flower-painter Pierre-Jopseph Redouté (1759-1840). These pages themself represent the circle of life and the eternal decay of everthing organic, as they show stains of age, of water and corrosion. Bosco Sodi had found thes pages in the Basement of Barcelona’s Family Gaspar while workers intended to throw away the affected pages of immanent beauty. By applying materials of consistency on to these fragile examples of life’s passage, Sodi leads to meditative reflections on beauty and dissolution.
As a third element of organic aproach, shiny vegetable sponges gleam from inside their wooden framings. Thickly covered in colour pigment and ashes the organic structure and delicacy of these unfamiliar creatures radiate nature’s mystery itself, yet still, preserved for what seems to be eternal.
The last work on display is the cross of “Juan“. Sodi has created a set of wooden crosses, heavily nailed and painted, each referring one of Jesus’ Apostles. More than two meters in height and painted with strong orange and red, the cross refers to John the Baptist, Juan in spanish.
Bosco Sodi’s art is influenced by a wide spectrum of artists that include Rothko, Kandinsky, Malevich, but he especially admires Tapies for his ability to impart a human sense and spirituality to his works through their material properties. Sodi's works handily succeed in achieving a heightened sense of spirituality through the transcendence of their materiality.
With excerpts from: Synaesthestic Topologies – on Bosco Sodi, by Kóan Jeff Baysa