Bosco Sodi, Spheres and Sack paintings

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi at Kanaal’s Karnak space. Installed in Karnak’s industrial column hall is a selection of large clay spheres that the artist refers to as “perfect bodies”, which are mysteriously dispersed throughout the room alongside the site’s permanent installation of Dvaravati Buddha statues. Each sphere is handmade and baked in a rustic kiln, creating unique and unpredictable results. The exhibition features a series of “Sun Paintings” that Sodi made during the pandemic in his studio in Puerto Escondido, Mexico painted on found burlap sacks that were used to transport chili pepper. Inspired by the sun’s cyclical rising and setting, Sodi finds spirituality in the everyday, capturing it with the repeated act of painting.

Sodi strips his work of the notion of time — here reflected using centuries-old, timeless methods and pigments that were used in ancient cultures. These pigments ensure that the work radiates a certain organic energy that develops as the materials age naturally with unpredictable hardening and cracking.

The eight sack paintings are dispersed throughout Karnak but cannot be glimpsed in their entirety from a single vantage point. Hidden behind the pillars, visitors may achieve a partial glimpse of the whole, step-by-step discovering the incidental patterns of the spheres and painted dots. The circles on the sacks seem to radiate the shape of the spheres, flattened on the burlap. Both sculptures and paintings relate to one another, while their rhythm and ratio seemingly hold a hidden code or language long gone.

The exhibition space is named after the Egyptian temple of Karnak. The atmosphere created by the industrial pillars radiates that of a place of worship. The four defaced Dvaravati Buddha statues embody a universal language: without the head, which usually contained all the details and gave the statues their identifying characteristics. The purity of the sculpted forms reveals the essence of peace and humanity. Western, Asian, and Egyptian iconography meet in this space. Transcending time and space in Karnak, the art objects are on an everlasting search for a universal, empyrean beauty.