Bosco Sodi

Bosco Sodi - Untitled

Artist Biography:

 

Based between New York and Casa Wabi, his residence, studio and non-profit arts center in Oaxaca, Mexico, Bosco Sodi (b. 1970) is known for his preindustrial minimalist sculptures and his highly textured, vividly pigmented paintings. Working between the U.S. and Mexico, the artist demonstrates the dichotomy within these two different environments through an investigative admission of their conceptual and geographical climates. The present work is a testament to the artist's ability to straddle the natural and the manmade. Sodi's practice acknowledges and actively incorporates these environments, so inherently different both geographically and conceptually. They are foundational to his creative process, as much as chance and the traditional Japanese aesthetic philosophy of "Wabi-Sabi" are. His works are shaped by the choice to embrace the accidental, that moment of non-control, while working in complete harmony with the natural elements. He rejects the use of tools and does not delegate the production of his pieces. Rather, he works in an intensely direct, gestural, and performative manner, therefore generating a uniquely transcendental line of transmission between artist and artwork. These processes at the basis of both his sculptural and painterly practices result in surfaces rich of rough textures, cracks, and chasms. Once monochrome bodies created mixing natural materials (ground minerals, stone, clay, wood) to manmade ones (sawdust, glues, glazes), their surfaces are modified by the passing of time. They are subject to natural drying processes, left to experience and show the marks of weathering, or fired in high temperature kilns, ultimately revealing beautifully organic structures that subvert the artistic form and stand as relics of Sodi's direct intervention into nature. Sodi creates his paintings by applying thick layers of mixed sawdust, color pigments and glue. Once the surface dries, it is transformed into an intensely three-dimensional texture that embraces the accidental, absorbing the energy of the artist's hands-on art-making process, generating highly emotive paintings reminiscent of earth-like structures and dried landscapes.