Bosco Sodi: Elemental

Museo Anahuacalli straddles nature and culture in a way that is distinctively Mesoamerican, being a physical double reference to mountain and pyramid, volcano and godhouse. The rock from which the museum is built comes from the lava plain produced by Xitle, the volcano whose eruption destroyed Cuicuilco, one of Mexico City’s many pre-Hispanic precursors. “Bosco Sodi: Elemental” references the part of the museum that is prehistoric, even ahistoric: the rock and the heat, the volcano and the sublimity latent in it.

Diego Rivera’s strange and wonderful museum (geographically and culturally anahuac) contains an awesome survey of what man—motivated by need and hope, love, fear, fury, and madness—is capable of fashioning from Earth. But “Bosco Sodi: Elemental” is not about this extraordinary material culture. Reaching beneath, before, beyond, and outside history to something more basic and fundamental, Sodi’s sawdust paintings, volcanic rocks, and clay cubes cut through material culture like a fast-flowing river through an alluvial plain. They are not products of the earth but the presence of Earth itself.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Hilario Galguera.