Bosco Sodi “Vers l’Espagne”

Kasmin (515 W 27th)

This event has ended.

Kasmin presents an exhibition of new work by Bosco Sodi (b.1970, Mexico). Vers l’Espagne is Sodi’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Its title translates as “To Spain,” referencing Sodi’s desire to pay homage to the lineage of artists who influenced his early development as a painter. Drawing upon the evolution of art history from prehistoric cave painting through to modern Spanish artists Eduardo Chillida, Manolo Millares, Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies and Informalismo Catalan, Vers l’Espagne is a love letter to gesture, nature, and the artistic instinct.

The exhibition brings together five large-scale paintings with freestanding clay sculptures in the gallery’s flagship exhibition space. Entirely white, the restricted palette of the paintings develops the powerful simplicity of the raw, elemental materials—clay, sawdust, and pigment—that create the dense surfaces of the artist’s richly textured, monochromatic paintings. Sodi mixes the materials and throws them down onto a flat canvas in a gesturally energetic process that draws upon both creative intuition and chance. As the layers of material dry, structures form without the guidance or intervention of the artist, creating splintered ravines that recall primordial topographies and the fissured landscapes of his native Mexico.

In this series, Sodi calls particularly upon the work of Joan Miró and his three paintings titled Peinture sur fond blanc pour la cellule d’un solitaire (painting on a white background for the cell of a recluse) which are housed at the Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona, where Sodi lived and worked for a decade. The atmospheric qualities of the color create, according to Sodi, “a feeling of warmth, calmness, and repose.” On Miró’s works, Sodi has said, “The paintings are just a thin black line made in a single gesture on a huge white canvas. I always admired them: wondering how Miró, with one stroke, was capable of doing something so powerful and beautiful.”

As in Sodi’s wider practice, the emotive power of the works arises in part from their sincere engagement with nature and its materiality. As with earlier paintings Sodi begins by building a topography of materials and pigment, setting pre-conditions and allowing the nature of the materials and process determine the final outcome. In these works Sodi performs for the first time an additional series of physical actions, employing large tree branches to strike and impress fractal patterns upon the surface of the picture plane, once again emphasizing the presence of the natural world by imprinting its very form into the painting.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new career-spanning monograph published by Rizzoli, recently published in Spring 2020, as well as several off-site and institutional projects including an exhibition at featuring new black pigment paintings at CAC Malaga, a continuation of this new Ver l’Espagne series at Contemporary Art Museum at University South Florida, and a monumental sculpture Marble Muro at Casa Wabi, the artist’s foundation in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.