PONCE, PR.- The exhibition Bosco Sodi: Croatia opens at the Museo de Arte de Ponce on Sunday, December 2, at 5:00 pm. Artist Bosco Sodi (Mexico City, 1970) is known for his large monochromatic paintings, rich in texture, that explore materiality, color, and the beauty of raw nature. Bosco Sodi: Croatia consists of six large-format paintings whose cracked surface brings to mind a land burned by the sun and invites us to contemplate the complexities of the aesthetic experience. The exhibition is scheduled to run through March 4, 2013, and will be open to the general public from Wednesday to Monday from 10:00 am to 5:30 pm.

Sodi’s work is an adventure into the unknown; it is driven by the unpredictable, the accidental, and the unique simplicity that is found in the natural landscape. With his hands, Sodi builds up layers of material endemic to nature—pigment, natural fibers, sawdust, and fragments of wood—on the canvas. He continues this process, which he carries out spontaneously, without plan, for one or two days. In time, the surface cracks and solidifies like lava when it cools, creating a suggestive field of color and texture that reflects the exuberant energy with which it was created.

Although the series is titled Croatia—the artist was traveling in that country when he envisioned the series—Sodi produced the six paintings simultaneously in his studio in New York. He imagines these works as “blood brothers with different personalities,” born at the same time with the same materials, but each one completely different from the others due to the unpredictability of the process. Sodi’s work falls within the twentieth-century Abstract avant-garde, and reveals echoes of Antoni Tàpies’ pinturas matéricas (matter paintings, in which non-“artistic” materials are incorporated into the paintings) and Mark Rothko’s color-field work. They explore the contemporary dilemma of what painting is and what it will be in the future.

The idea of bringing this exhibition to Puerto Rico arose during a visit the artist made to the Museo de Arte de Ponce last year. This visit was the beginning of a collaborative alliance between the museum and the Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico City and the Pace Gallery in New York, the world-renowned gallery that represents Sodi. Before its opening in Puerto Rico, the exhibition was shown at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso and the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, both in Mexico City.