LA BELLEZA DE LA IMPERFECCIÓN
EN LA POÉTICA DE BOSCO SODI.
Truth can be found in shadows, and aesthetic emotion arises most, on occasions, when we contemplate a marvellous imperfection. Beyond geometrising rationalism and far from the fear of the real, a poetic vision of the world emerges that allows us to find beauty in a crevice. With a sensibility that unites the impulse towards the romantic absolute and the acceptance of the ephemeral in the key of oriental meditation, Bosco Sodi has built his own artistic space that, above all, invites us to a serene contemplation of the world. This Mexican artist, with true international renown, has pointed out that his aesthetics has to do with the joyful acceptance of chance: 'The main premise -he declared in an interview in 2013- is the search for the accident, for the unexpected. You have to have as little control as possible over the process. I believe that things become unique when there is an unforeseen event, when they cannot be repeated. I aspire that the works do not seem to be made by human beings but part of nature'. When we stand in front of his imposing paintings we can feel that they have a natural aspect, as if those monochromatic surfaces were alive and the painting were, in a certain sense, a territory which we could inhabit.
Bosco Sodi deploys his pictorial energy by freeing himself from the modernist orthodoxy of 'flatness' and, of course, refusing to fall into the nihilism of the 'end of art' or Duchampian fetishisation. Antoni Tàpies, an artist whom Sodi has admired for decades, pointed out in his referential essay 'Communication on the Wall' that his conception of the informal-gestural had to do with the work of Bodidarma, founder of Zen, and added that Oriental culture had already defined certain elements or feelings in works of art that unconsciously surfaced in his paintings: 'the ingredients Sabi, Wabi, Aware, Yugen... Which in Buddha meditation also seek support in Kasinas sometimes consisting of earth placed in a frame, in a hole, in a wall, in charred matter'. Bosco Sodi has made Wabi-Sabi the key to his art and his life, cultivating a sense of temporality, humility, asymmetry and imperfection, that is, assuming the beautiful fragility of existence.
Bosco Sodi's gold-covered spheres are inspired by Buddhism, insisting on the beauty of the unrepeatable, and alluding to, more than luxury, the magic of life, to that singularity that shines even when the sky darkens. In his exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Malaga in 2020 he presented imposing black paintings alongside enigmatic 'sculptures' with golden rocks. 'Black,' Sodi noted on that occasion, 'bathes everything in an absence, brings out an opacity, and dissolves all shades of shadow and light. Bosco Sodi's intensely 'illuminated' spheres generate a space-time phenomenon of concentration and, at the same time, remind us of Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadow.
Tàpies pointed out that, beneath the ideologies and the fatal contingencies of the world, there is the impulse of our instinct for life, for knowledge, for love, 'for freedom, which has been preserved and vivified by the wisdom of all times'. Undoubtedly, Bosco Sodi also seeks that wisdom of serenity, understanding, as Octavio Paz did, that sunyata is the nature of samsara (dynamic confluence of emptiness and fullness), but also realising that permanence can be momentary. Sodi's works are (poetically) alive, their (essential) matter is emotion and perhaps what he is looking for, in this wasteland, is a peace that escapes all comprehension, in short, a (cracked) beauty in which mystery beats.
Press release courtesy Galeria Hilario Galguera. Text: Fernando Castro Flórez.
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