Bosco Sodi, Folegandros

Agio Georgios

This series, like others by my father, is best referred to as an anthology. It is written more than painted. It is painted, of course, but through him, it is more like assembling words. His language is different. He traces letters with matter, words with colour, and the sentences are strung with frames. Each step is always interesting: the materials he sources and from where they’re sourced. It’s interesting to connect the beauty of his work to the source simply because it’s beautiful. His paintings, at least to my eyes, are beautiful by rule but sublime only by condition. It isn’t the process of his that defines his work as interesting, redundant, sublime, and ugly. I have always seen it as his connection to the process that makes the work — the coagulation, paint, glue, sawdust, sublime. People are in love with the story, quite understandably, but interacting with a piece from my father begs you to look past the aesthetics or the mythology of the process, and out onto the language he only speaks while he paints.

Many have described it as a dance. It is a good description, but it’s more of a mediation. It lacks the performative nature of dance, and it is completely individualistic. With the privilege of living in his studios, carrying painted buckets, and building stretchers as he paints right next to me, it is clear that something is poured into the piece, something unconscious. One does not understand his paintings. One can only hope to understand how to approach them. They’re not something that can be given meaning or held in place much like himself, or anybody. Of the many things written about my father, I found many to be lost in the signs and symbols of his work and personality. Of the few things that get at the depth of his work, this sentence by Agustin Arteaga captures an essential quality:

The abstract character of Bosco Sodi’s works releases emotions which do not respond to a narrative then, but which rather derive from the association with intimate experiences or through references to a collective imagination.

The meditative nature of the creation guides the painting by emotion, intimacy, and feeling that, in his trance, he lines his work with. A painting’s wonder comes from the energy and fascination released in his meditation. It is his ardour for chaos, the time listening for new colours,* the labour of preparing the stretcher, the canvas, the mixing of the paint, the feeling as it slips through his fingers, the varying gravity drawing him to different parts of the canvas, the agony he always describes, as he contemplates the piece he works on at night, everything up to the moment when he asks me to come to look at it standing up.

They become an extension of him. This is why he despises questions asking him to explain his work. It becomes a request to objectify himself, to limit the painting. The only concept that lies in the work is in the structure of it, how he taps into and expresses his unconscious, his meditation. Each painting is entirely unique, tied together only by the artist.

What occurs is an expression of energy, one that one picks up on by tapping into certain meditative feelings of a collective unconscious. The richness of the pieces’ contemplation, lies in a meditative response, one that instead of expressing, absorbs; to feel the pieces, one has to participate in a reciprocal process. I theorise that the sublimity of his larger paintings comes from an assault on the meditative nature of the work on the senses. One needs less focus to create a sublime connection with the painting. That’s also probably why he always says the paintings are better seen alone, without distraction.

My father always talks about energy — regarding people, earth, food, a building, a cup, all the time measuring it. To him, it’s always about energy. It’s what moves him, what helps him choose. In Folegandros, there’s a walk we often take to a beach called Katergo. The path winds through the valley of a mountain, each step tunneled by rock walls. All around the island, there are unnecessary sculptures that mark paths, only a few of which line walkable roads. The path of interest is singular in the magnitude of the individual parts that make up the barriers. One wonders how many people it took to carry and place each stone segment. Three hundred metres along this path, there was a rock my father always stopped by. Measuring about 5o x 100 cm in size, the stone has dozens of holes gouged out by an eternity of restless wind and water. We walked past it, and each time he talked about taking the rock home. He always asked me to help him move it, and it never budged. After about two years, one day, we had half of our family tree staying with us on the island, and he rallied us all together for the impossible task. The group included fifty years olds, teenagers, and children younger than ten. The rock now sits at the front entrance of our family’s Folegandos home.

Of the many impulsive projects he has undertaken in his lifetime, my father’s self-establishment on the island may have been one of the more random ones I’ve witnessed. While on a sailing trip years ago, we stopped on the island for one night. The night turned into two days. Even after, as we walked the port, he eyed a real estate office and saw a posted image of a barren extension circling tentatively a charming precipice at the island’s edge. A quick call enlisted a more-than-eager local Greek man to take him to see the land for sale. To be impulsive is a reductive term. His decision is naturally reflective

of his art, or his art is reflective of it; he let the feeling carry him. It demanded that it be acted on, leaving my father ultimately blameless. When the decision bore fruit, he said to me that nowhere else had he ever felt so at peace, so connected to a place. To connect to something as he described it, to think the saltiness of the air, the roughness of the roads, and the marble inscribed along the beaches could be felt and loved as if it was alive. The very feeling demanded to him in his restlessness the creation of a studio. From its completion, another process began to take shape. As his arrival approached, he collected deadwood that transfixed him, those that centre the pieces now. He invited Manolo Ros, someone who has always held a special place in his heart as, “Manolete, an artist friend that lent him a hand setting up the studio. Sourcing the pigments, the tools, the buckets, all from the house of curiosities that deals in 1000 different trades like the surreal department stores in Marcel’s Bleu’s, “The Impersonal Adventure”.

This painting anthology is imbued with my father’s fascination with the island. It extends to the beach walks, the restless wind, and the simplicity he feels when he goes spearfishing. Every connection flows from his meditations into paintings. All share the restless and sublime energy he carries in relation to the setting.

Few times has he explained his paintings, and in reference to this series, he told me they represent the story of humanity. I laugh now, realising that of all the things that could be said, this was the only one that couldn’t rob anything from them. Every aspect of it was sewn with a relationship between the language he speaks and himself. A self that carries with it every subsequent relationship. A culmination of which gives it its humanity. The series is not a history, but it invertedly tells the tale of my father in Folegandros at this specific time. That feeling touches something collectively as one looks at that which has transfixed a person and been cemented somewhere in the patterns and cracks that run through this anthology. It runs partly along with what it means to be human. It says as much about the viewer as it does himself. It requires no connection but immediately establishes one between the spectator and my father. You don’t have to know or understand him to understand his work, but when you understand his work, then you begin to know and understand my father.

Juan Bosco Sodi Corredor

*Listening, in a metaphorical sense, in the ways that one is without choice when searching for colour, as though one hears without deliberation. Listening implies more than looking for one colour or searching from an available palette in a supply store but hearing and being in the search for expression via colour. Listening visualises patience, absorption, and contemplation about what’s been absorbed. To be on the lookout for colour is like listening for/to a particular line in a song. It’s a certain hue that my father happens upon (like the ceiling of Egyptian tombs, which he did for a series) and then he just thinks about it (moving from hearing to listening) and I remember once, as time passed, he mentioned the ceiling again and that’s what I mean by listening.