Bosco Sodi: Malpaís

Malpaís references the term used in Spanish-speaking regions for a rough and barren landscape, or "badland,” bringing to mind the richly pigmented and textured, monumental paintings for which Bosco Sodi is known. The artist creates dense monochromes using raw pigment mixed with sawdust, wood pulp, natural fibers, and glue, which he applies, layer by layer, to large canvases. As the pieces dry, the surfaces begin to crack. Well-known antecedents of color field painting here telescope into the beauty of badlands, as seen from miles above the earth. The results are aesthetic and otherworldly, like the desert itself. Malpaís presents a renewal of abstraction in the ongoing compression of a familiar yet distant topography.

Made at his home in Oaxaca, Sodi’s solid clay cubes are cut from the ground, combining raw earth with water and sand to produce the material. The faces and corners of the cubes are smoothed by hand, resulting in an imperfect geometry that bears the results of the process. Each half-a-meter tall, the cubes are stacked in columns, producing precarious architectural forms through which the viewers can move. Notes Noguchi Museum curator Dakin Hart, “the only thing they contain is earth; they are vessels for and of their own substance.”

Created by another form of extraction and manipulation of natural materials, Sodi’s volcanic rock sculptures source dried volcanic magma from the Ceboruco volcano in Mexico, bringing recent geological formations with ancient and precious metals, in the form of the gold or red ceramic glaze which encases them. Each rock is selected for their formal qualities, then glazed and fired at extremely high temperatures for three days, altering their surface texture and creating an incongruity between the setting and the source, and the exterior and core, of each piece.