博斯克•索迪, Scroll Paintings

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present Scroll Paintings, a solo exhibition of works by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi. This marks Sodi’s sixth solo presentation with the gallery and his second in Hong Kong since 2020. Known for his richly textured, vividly colored paintings, Sodi’s practice focuses on material exploration, the creative gesture and the spiritual connection between the artist and his work. Scroll Paintings debuts a new body of work that emerged from the extended time the artist spent in his Kyoto studio over the past few years. There, immersed in a different kind of silence, Sodi turned his attention away from building mass, towards something more elusive: holding a moment. The resulting paintings are quiet yet profound contemplations of time, expressed through languages of materiality and form.

Sodi’s longstanding affinity with Asian culture began more than two decades ago, when he was invited to an artist residency in Tokyo. Since then, the philosophical concept of wabi-sabi has been a vital thread running throughout his practice. Embracing imperfection, transience, simplicity, and the generative forces of nature, Sodi has consistently used raw, natural materials to create objects and paintings that embody the deep emotive power present in the simplicity of material and pigment. His process is fundamentally a dialogue with these materials. As layers of earth, pigment, and organic elements are applied and left to dry, they crack, shift, and form structures beyond his control. Unpredictability and chance become collaborators, with each finished piece becoming both memory and relic – a tangible record of the intimate conversations between artist and material.

In Scroll Paintings, Sodi extends this dialogue by engaging with the traditional scroll format – a form rich in discipline and history, deeply admired by the artist. For him, materials are never neutral; they carry life long before he approaches them. Each scroll in this body of work is handmade by a craftsman using vintage textiles, carrying memories and presences of their own. Sodi carefully selects each piece and enters a dialogue with this tradition – preserving its textures, colors, and inherent spirit while introducing his contemporary sensibility. What emerges is a tension between these two languages of making: the loose, unstable, and almost temporary character of Sodi’s materials meeting the precise, contained, and structured elegance of the craftsman’s scroll.

As the artist himself observes, “I think of these pieces as moments suspended. Not images, not compositions in a traditional sense, but presences. Something that exists between stillness and energy.” The body of work in Scroll Paintings invite unhurried viewing – an open-ended exploration in which textures, cracks and subtle shifts of pigment gradually reveal themselves. What emerges is not representation but presence: time made visible, held gently in suspension, and offered to the viewer for quiet reflection.