Bosco Sodi

BOSCO SODI (Mexico City, 1970).
Untitled, 2001.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner. Signed, dated and dedicated on the back.
Measurements: 97 x 130 cm; 100 x 133 cm (frame).

This painting belongs to a relatively early stage of Bosco Sodi's brilliant career, when the author explored compositions more expressive in the chromatic contrast than in the organic textures. The yellow upper part conveys a sense of energy and luminous warmth, in contrast to the black part that evokes gravity, depth and introspection. This duality is filled with meanings related to the telluric as opposed to the ethereal.

Based in New York, Barcelona, Berlin and Mexico City, Bosco Sodi is a renowned Mexican creator of self-taught training, who has become the heir to the tradition of informalism and abstract expressionism. He points to Rothko and Tàpies as two of his teachers; he admires the former for his masterful use of color, and the latter for his interpretation of material and his appreciation of oriental sensibility. Sodi's work has gone through different periods, the result of his eagerness to investigate. In his own words, he uses painting as an "inexhaustible source of new sensations", and defines it as "painting of the soul". The dazzling chromatism reflected in his work, and the explosion of vitality it contains, are intimately united with the materials, which give shape to magmatic orographies. To achieve this material expressiveness he uses all kinds of elements, from sawdust to earth or iron filings, as well as large quantities of pigment. This conjunction of materials also has to do with the fact that Sodi conceives the physical act of painting as something telluric; he works the materials with his hands, directly, shaping them as a farmer works the earth. On the other hand, chance also plays a leading role in his work: accident and the unexpected act as another element that gives shape to his works. Throughout his career, Bosco Sodi has held solo exhibitions in Spain, Mexico, Italy, Portugal, Colombia, Japan, the United States and Germany, among the most recent being those held at the San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and the Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoyo (Japan), both in 2012. He has also held personal exhibitions in important art centers such as the Bronx Museum in New York, the Casa de Asia in Barcelona, the Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya or the Museo Internazionale delle Arti Applicate Oggi in Turin. He has also taken part in group exhibitions all over the world, and participated in fairs such as Art Basel, FIAC, ARCO, FRIEZE, MACO, Hong Kong Art Fair, CORNICE, SCOPE Basel, Los Angeles Art Show, China International Gallery Exposition, Art Cologne, etc.