Bosco Sodi: Solo Para Revivir

Bosco Sodi’s third solo exhibition at Kasmin, Solo Para Revivir, presents new works in an ambitious installation exploring the compelling material and conceptual relationships between the artist’s painting and sculpture. Sodi’s deepening investigations into the symbolic power of four elemental colors—black, purple, red, and green—are expressed in several large-scale mixed media paintings imbued with impressions of nature: indented with the fractal structure of tree branches drawn from the surroundings of the artist’s studio, or subjected to the pull of gravity as they dry.

Rendered in powerful, saturated hues, Sodi’s paintings are grounded in the exhibition by three freestanding clay spheres and a monumental oil painting realized on a canvas of twelve interwoven burlap sacks. Furthering the artist’s recent focus on the stages of life, Solo Para Revivir translates to ‘only to wake’, metaphorically reinforcing the incessant, even primal, drive at the heart of the creative instinct, and how this impulse is mirrored in the cycles of the natural world. Engaging with the most fundamental materials and forms, Sodi prompts reflections on the innate, ineffable structures of our universe; our interdependence with our environment; and the artistic interventions that are able to transform physical matter into signifiers of the non-corporal world.

These themes of dislocation and the unity of human experience were further explored in What Goes Around Comes Around in Venice. At the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, Sodi presented monumental canvases alongside a series of ceramic spheres, each representing a different nation. Viewers were encouraged to move the spheres across the room during the course of the installation. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Sodi added a large sphere to the center of the installation, representing humanity and gesturing to his hope for global peace. Following the close of the exhibition, residents of Venice were invited to take the spheres home.

Sodi’s invocation of the planting and harvesting cycles that humanity has long relied upon is reiterated in his sack paintings. Beginning in 2020, without access to his usual canvases while in quarantine in Puerto Escondido, Sodi found new use for heavily aged objects at his disposal: dry burlap chili sacks. Used to distribute agricultural harvests, Sodi found this material an ideal substrate for a new painting series. In the initial stages of the lockdown, Sodi rendered one “Sun Painting”—a circle over a burlap sack—per day, instancing a record of his isolation period. As if to offer a counterbalance, the work on view depicts a blue circle over twelve burlap sacks, gesturing toward elemental associations with water while recalling the lunar calendar’s primacy in pre-industrial societies.