Bosco Sodi

Eduardo Secci is pleased to present Bosco Sodi, the first solo exhibition held in Florence, Italy by the Mexican contemporary artist Bosco Sodi. The show will be curated by Ludovico Pratesi and will be inaugurated at our main exhibition spaces in Piazza Goldoni 2 on September 11, 2020 at 4:00 pm. Bosco Sodi (Mexico City, 1970), through his highly structured and vividly colored, large-scale paintings, researches the emotional power in the essentiality of the materials he uses to execute his works. By focusing on the material exploration, on the creative gesture and on the spiritual connection between the artist and his work, Sodi transcends any conceptual or theoretical barrier that could lead away from the centrality of the artwork itself. And thus the artistic choice to leave many of his paintings untitled, a choice aimed at removing any kind of bias or connection besides the immediate existence of his works. Most of Sodi’s pieces featured in the exhibition were produced over the course of the past three years, moving between the New York City studio and Oaxaca studio in Mexico. Characterized by a marked three-dimensionality, whether they are paintings or sculptures, Sodi’s works have a twofold connection with the elements that they are composed of. If, on one hand, materials such as raw pigments, sawdust, glue, wood and clay require an intense physical process that sees the artist as the agent of this material transformation, on the other hand the autonomy of the elements is preserved and seconded by leaving the participation of chance in the foreground. Thus, Sodi’s works find their uniqueness every time in the encounter between the creative act and the characteristics of the individual materials. “For me painting is a research, a journey. I don’t like to arrive in a place and begin to paint immediately. It is a complex journey: this type of research puts you in the condition of finding pigments, sawdust, to decide the density of color mixtures.” With these words the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi defines the foundation elements of his artistry: first of all, the attention to the place where the work is realized, which provides the strictly material aspect to the work, in a perfect balance between the composition of the different materials among each other and the choice of chromatic pigments. Each element is analyzed with great care by the artist to realize his works, each of which may have been carried out in a different place in the world, from Mexico City to Berlin. However, if even the formula defined and put into practice by Bosco Sodi through years of experience is structured in its essential components, the result is never predictable, since the element of chance plays a key role and makes every work unique. “In some way, it’s a sort of action painting. Something very physical,” says Sodi. In fact, the artist’s practice is an organic process that combines the artist’s ability of manipulation with the effects of time and nature on the materials. Just as in an exchange of energy, Sodi triggers a transformative process where the outcome will be provided by a combination of elements of fortuity and non-controllability. It’s a procedure influenced by the principles of the Japanese Wabi-Sabi aesthetic philosophy, which was founded, in turn, on the acceptance of the transience of things, the recognition of imperfections of daily life and the celebration of simplicity. Within the exhibition, the energy of color, as a constitutive trait of the works by Bosco Sodi, is now declined in brilliant turquoise tonalities, or in the black and white binomial of the homonym series. In fact, it is art informel artists, such as Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet, master colorists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko and the native imaginary of the artist that have influenced Bosco Sodi’s practice. In this way, the physical presence of the works, together with the power of color, invite the spectator to a mystic-meditative contemplation on the physicality of labor and on the transcendence of elements that originate it; a reflection that becomes even more intense by looking at the sculptural works by the artist, such as the clay spheres and the matters of strength, power and brutality that they raise. “I want to show people a sort of chaos, a kind of uniqueness, an energy of colors. It’s a controlled chaos: controlled because I am the one who decides the size of the works, a good part of the structure, and the balance of the painting.” When facing a painting by Bosco Sodi, we should let ourselves go, be captivated by the suggestive colors, and delve in a magmatic and stratified surface, which can recall a rock formation, a meadow of lichens, a cell structure, or even a Mandelbrot fractal. This exhibit may be the first step of a journey in Sodi’s painting, a search for his primitive essence, which each work holds in a sort of “chromatic incandescence” and whose power seems impossible to be recognized.