The Matter With Matter : An Interview With Bosco Sodi

Rajesh Punj

Mexican American artist Bosco Sodi is as much driven by imperfections in the process making part of his work, as he is appreciative of the clean context in which they reappear as artworks. Creating these concentrated crusts of earth and matter, that as canvases were originally laid out on the floor of one of his studios; (close to the Hudson River in New York, the small port of Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, Mexico; the original artists’ quarter in Barcelona and central Berlin), and then upturned for exhibition. From where Sodi methodically prepares all of the raw elements that mother earth can muster, to create works that are entirely other worldly.

Fanatical about the process involved in applying aesthetic skins to man-made canvas and volcanic rock, Sodi’s accelerated annotations have us quarrel over the details of the physical strength of one material over another. Before he introduces further truths, of the point at which a rock can be burned in order to immortalize it as an artwork, and how he allows his coloured pigments, glue and dust, to physically infestate his canvases in order the critical cracks that come become the point of no return. The juncture at which his congealed canvases move from being studio fixtures, to the celestial backdrop for other sculptural works in a space that comes to resemble outer space.