contessanally: Collateral Event - Biennale Arte 2022 - Palazzo Vendramin Grimani - Bosco Sodi - What Goes Around Comes Around

Collateral Event - La Biennale di Venezia - Biennale Arte 2022

Fondazione dell' Albero d'Oro - Palazzo Vendramin Grimani

Bosco Sodi - What Goes Around Comes Around

Party Photos

In the recently restored Palazzo Vendramin Grimani on the Canal Grande the Fondazione dell'Albero d'Oro presented a new project - curated by Daniela Ferretti and Dakin Hart - entitled - Bosco Sodi at Palazzo Vendramin Grimani - What Goes Around Comes Around - until November 27. Mexican artist Bosco Sodi created the paintings and sculptures during a period of residency on site in the palazzo in Venice this Spring.

“controlled chaos.

something that is completely unrepeatable.”

Bosco Sodi - 1970 - is celebrated internationally for his use of raw, natural materials in large-scale textured paintings and sculpture that brim with emotive power. The essential simplicity of his materials and the vivid pigments he sources from around the globe are the focus of his process-based exploration of the creative gesture. Sodi has described his creative process as a “controlled chaos” that makes “something that is completely unrepeatable.”

Bosco Sodi

The ground floor of the palazzo was transformed into Bosco Sodi's studio during his residency this spring. There, the artist realized some works for the exhibition, drawing on Venice’s unique history as a dynamic hub for cultural and commercial exchanges between Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world.

The Ground Floor

"‘revenge’ of all that is raw, unprocessed."

In the installation for Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, visitors can witness an abrupt reversal of that ancient flow of trade between Europe and the Americas. The opulent interiors of merchant houses like Palazzo Vendramin Grimani preserve the memory of what was, historically, a one-way flow of materials. Sodi’s temporary occupation of the palazzo’s walls and floors with works closely linked to the material instinct that produces them lead to a sort of ‘revenge’ of all that is raw, unprocessed.

Daniela Ferretti

co-curator

On the piano nobile, the rough, intensely coloured surfaces that are typical of Bosco Sodi form a contrast with the monumental spaces of the drawing room and the side rooms, with the colours of their plasterwork and tapestries, with the textures of the Venetian terrazzo floors, with the reflections of mirrors clouded by time, with the ceilings decorated with neoclassical frescoes, thick wooden beams or eighteenth-century stuccoes, and with the shimmering light streaming through the windows overlooking the Canal Grande.

The Piano Nobile

Gilles Etrillard and Beatrice de Reynies

The careful selection and use of precious pigments is one of the characteristics of Sodi’s art: some of them have a rich historical background.

Before the invention of synthetic pigments, the colour obtained from cochineal was the international standard for red. The luxurious red fabrics that dot Titian’s canvases are, quite literally, appropriations from the Americas. Cochineal, which is still produced in Oaxaca - Mexico - has recently seen an increase in demand, thanks to the growing demand for natural pigments.

The Piano Nobile

Mattia Berto and Roberto Piffer

In addition, in parallel with the installation of the works made on site, Sodi placed 195 small clay spheres on the floor of the exhibition spaces, moulded from the soil of Oaxaca and baked there in an improvised oven on the beach. The figure corresponds to the current number of nation-states on Earth. Each visitor is invited to move one of the miniature globes during their visit. In this way the installation will change a little every day and the different locations of the globes will be periodically photographed in order to document the evolution of the work. At the end of the exhibition, residents of the city of Venice who visit the space will be able to take a sphere with them, thus completing a new, though still largely enigmatic, circuit of exchange.