Bosco Sodi, Sedimentos

Bosco Sodi
Roger Pierre Turine

Here is a magician of painting. As much a kamikaze of the material as of the painted work itself. As much a magician as a developer of the depths of bare pigment, the magma that it represents when projected onto a canvas.

In a way, Bosco Sodi portrays a world before the world. Or, who knows, the world as it will be when everything will be nothing but accumulated dust, wreckage in abundance, chaos, burnt graveyard. A world before the great human adventure or after the final blast, the cataclysms that flow under the dictatorial powers when they disorient life’s noblest challenges, smashed on the altar of exclusive profit.

Does Sodi ask himself questions on the destiny of things? Without a doubt. Only asking would already answer the question. It’s also up to everyone to receive his magmatic universe according to his way of apprehending earthly space and the art of this time now.

By painting as he does, by playing the material he projects on his altar that is the canvas, he foils immobilism. He rushes, bull leaping into an arena that, for artistic purposes, is nonetheless the arena of the artist’s fight with a canvas that’s supposed to represent him. And, through him and her, it represents a broken world. A molten volcano.

Torero, as a Picasso could be before him, as a Barceló nowadays, he bursts the screen to find himself, sometimes, in front of and behind his canvas at the same time. Sodi literally wraps himself in pigment. One might say, he’s almost the pigment facing the canvas.

He does it with the energy of hope for the material to spread, to expand, virgin and bare, swollen, on the canvas. A canvas that he submits to his instinctive iconoclasm.

Before him, Fontana cut ​​the canvas of violence with a knife. Bram Bogart made dough thrown like cobblestones in the pond. Lindström tracked elves in the hollow of heavy impastos. Dubuffet composed universes “à l’état brut”. Tapiès burst the screen of his black nights... The code breakers, the rebels to the chloroform act, were legion throughout the history of art.

Coming from Mexico, a country fed with deism, propitiatory acts, cults, and violence, Bosco Sodi joined his ancestors in sorts of black masses. Without any god, they sing Mother Earth’s world, nourishing and wild.

Contrary to appearances, we are not in the decor, the pretty raw material. It is a hand-to-hand fight with the material and the space that it condenses once freed from the hand of the artist. With Sodi, we’re in the illustration — in the sense of the affirmation — of a world that’s heading towards an even more terrifying chaos. A burning world that’s still searching and agitated. A world that he re-appropriates to better explode on his canvas.

As I said: others long before were "materialist" artists. He innovates in his own way pushing to a "clash". As Niki de Saint-Phalle did, in another way and from another perspective, when, with a rifle on her shoulder, she was shooting at sight on her dolls, her dislocated world.

Bosco Sodi clashes with the bridle down. All of his energy is obsessed by the square of the canvas, a surface that’s way too clean. He roars and reddens his canvas so that it screams its challenge of the worrying news of a world crushed by false values. His universe asserts itself as much in minor format as in monumental expression with, without stopping, these "explosions" of very diverse forms exploded on the support that receives them. Side-by-side, these explosions disrupt the imagination by offering various solutions, the diversity of jets and accidents that structure each set may well concentrate in them different emotions.

Truly a trance, Sodi doesn’t explain the end of the action. It was made by him, a part of it all, a performance that will never be the same again. Neither tomorrow nor the day after tomorrow. The act that causes him to roar on his canvas, small or large, invariably depends on his feelings at the moment of action. Its preparations, by working in New York, Madrid, Barcelona or Berlin, must consider the variations of humidity or ambient heat that will change the nature and concretisation of its natural pigments — sawdust and wood pulp, fibre, water, binding. The result will be different colours, violent or more soothed, saturated, of various thicknesses. Subjected to the elements, to the products, to the rhythm of the artist’s orchestration, the desired cracks and fissures will create openings, fractures which, free from all rules, will in their turn cause new and uncontrollable accidents.

That's all the happiness of the man’s work who calls himself a "traveller". Traveller on both known and unknown lands. Hence, providential magic that can never be repeated. Sodi’s organic, pulpy, volcanic world is certainly a monochromatic world, but an exponential monochrome, charged like a stormy sky, boiling. His decor is existential. He’s a man committed to this universe that, in many ways, takes water and breaks up while he believes he’s constantly strengthening himself and avoiding migrations that threaten his fortuitous stability. Sodi does not fear ephemeral performance.

In November 2017, in the heart of Greenwich Village, in the very park where Trump's madness was so contested, he built a Muro, a brick wall — two meters high, eight meters wide. 1,600 bricks made by Mexican workers — an explicit metaphor of the wall wanted by the American President along the border between the United States and Mexico.

Supreme elegance: each visitor was invited to take one of these bricks signed by Sodi. This also means that a wall can never be eternal.

In Wijnegem, for the opening of his exhibition at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Sodi will execute his Muro again. Exhibiting for the first time in Belgium, Bosco Sodi will, without a doubt, rattle the calm of our households.

Roger Pierre Turine
August 15, 2018
This text was translated from the author’s original French version.