ICARUS

Bosco Sodi: Icarus, or The Boy Who Fell to Earth

About suffering they were never wrong/The old Masters —W.H. Auden

In Greek lore, Icarus was the son of the most celebrated artist of that mythical age, the master craftsman Daedalus, creator of the Labyrinth in which he imprisoned the fabled Minotaur. Held subsequently in the same maze, Icarus and his father attempted to escape from the island of Crete by means of an ingeniously constructed pair of wings. Made from feathers and wax, the device proved only as good as its wearer ́s judgment. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, the heat of the sun ́s rays melted the wax and he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea.

A story connected in the collective imagination largely to the sin of hubris— which according to the Greeks reveals excessive pride in defiance of the gods—the tale of Icarus has been interpreted and reinterpreted by cultural figures across the centuries. Among these artists and writers are Shakespeare, Milton, Pieter Brueghel the elder and the poet W.H. Auden, to name just a few. The latest artist to take on this foundational Western myth is the Mexican painter and sculptor Bosco Sodi. In his hands, the tale of Icarus acquires a robust, grittier, decidedly more abstract ecological reading.

Save for the pilgrimages to locales like Marfa, Texas, or Roden Crater, Arizona, we typically look to documentation of massive 1970s earth art to communicate the ground- shaking power of the great outdoors. But in certain exceptional cases the experience of compacted rock, hard-encrusted dirt and age-old geological matter can also be contained within four walls—provided they happen in the right studio or gallery setting.In the case of Sodi ́s inaugural exhibition at Mestre Projects, José Mestre ́s new gallery, located in New Providence, Bahamas, provides the perfect environment for Sodi ́s nineteen mixed media on linen wall works and his gold-painted clay “lumbers”—as the artist refers to the twelve glazed ceramic bars he arranges in vertical stacks.

With regard to his highly organic, brightly pigmented and minimalist-inflected artworks, Sodi has always maintained that his authorship extends only as far as his partnership with nature will allow. In fashioning his vividly hued paintings—for which the artist uses organic pigments he sources in locations such as Morocco, India and his native Mexico— Sodi typically hand applies materials like earth, sawdust, natural fibers, glue and pure color to his linen canvases. Once he is satisfied with the effects of air, light, heat, altitude, aridity (or lack thereof) and gravity on his individual pieces, the artist then conscientiously steps back from his compositions to let their surfaces crack, erode and blister with little or no intervention.

The resulting works suggest nothing so much as the vast forces of nature itself, played out on an alternatingly large and more intimate human scale. “My work tries to evoke nature,” the artist has claimed in various interviews. “I look for accidents, for unpredictability.” In doing so, Sodi sidesteps certain industrial-strength conceptual biases typical of Western-style artistic minimalism. Instead of proposing a conventional cultural ethos related to the built environment of global capitals such as London, Paris and New York, Sodi ́s works invoke primordial and desert landscapes as well as the aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi, the Japanese ethos of finding value in imperfection.

A purveyor of an up-to-date combination of all-over abstraction (think Rothko’s use of color and Pollock’s physicality), art brut (Dubuffet’s pumice stone surfaces) and landscape painting (picture views of the Grand Canyon as painted by Jay DeFeo), Sodi’s canvases channel not just nature and its concomitant decay, but also the essential crudeness of the materials he uses to arrive at his wall-mounted compositions. His freestanding sculptures, for their part, produce a similarly organic effect: rather than harken back to the manufactured aesthetic of Richard Chamberlain and Donald Judd, Sodi ́s piled lumbers resemble pre-Columbian pyramids and ancient reliquary mounds as they might have looked before their ceremonial paint weathered or wore off.

About a previous set of volcanic rock sculptures Sodi gathered from nature and cast in a golden shell, the artist declared: “I like to take the organic form that has been created by centuries and centuries of climate change, and to glaze it with gold, making it into an object of desire, a precious object. Each rock is like it’s own universe.” So it is with the individual clay bars Sodi exhibits at Mestre Projects. A set of glazed bricks that connect to popular cultural referents, such as the valuable ingots held at treasuries like Fort Knox and the “yellow brick road” associated with the fantastical Land of Oz, Sodi ́s rough hewn clay bricks also actively underscore their essential nature. Basic building blocks, these lumbers toggle between useful and artistic objects, freely admixing their symbolic and market value—like all important art—into alchemical objects that contain both.

If Sodi leaves much of his work untitled, it is in part because nature itself requires no names. The Brooklyn-based artist also aims to remove any predisposition or connection beyond the immediate quiddity or existence of his objects. Thus, each of Sodi ́s artworks acquires the quality of a memorial, a relic that is symbolic of the artist ́s—and by extension, the viewer ́s—conversation with the raw material that brought the artwork into being. This, in great part, is the secret to the emotive power of Sodi ́s sculptures and paintings. Crude-seeming, visually immediate, and fundamentally raw in their appeal, the artist ́s objects appear to speak to and for nature, which has lately been expressing itself in fairly unequivocal terms about the dangers of climate change.

Enter Icarus. A titular reminder of man ́s enduring hubris during our new millennium, Sodi ́s powerful exhibition of primal paintings and sculptures recall Auden ́s ekphrastic— the term means “descriptive” when referencing a vivid narration of another work of art—portrayal of Brueghel ́s sixteenth century painting The Fall of Icarus in his poemMusee des Beaux Arts. In the poem, Auden describes the world ́s indifference to the drowning of the mythical flying boy: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster ... [Icarus ́] white legs disappearing into the green.”

Those legs, Sodi ́s elemental artworks remind us, might as well be our own. Post-climate change, the Mexican artist ́s paintings suggest we might inhabit an environment not unlike the brightly cracked topography of one of his paintings. These consistently predict, among other transcendently gorgeous landscapes, a sublime-looking if tremendously inhospitable season on Mars.

Christian Viveros-Fauné Brooklyn, 2017