WHO: Jose Mestre
COLLECTS: Contemporary and emergent art
WHERE: Born in Barcelona; based in New York’s Tribeca
PRIZED PIECE: Pangea, 2010, by Bosco Sodi
September 4, 2013Mestre also owns one of Sodi’s sculptures made from glazed volcanic rock; the artist created the untitled piece in 2012. Above: Jose Mestre has been collecting the work of Mexican artist Bosco Sodi for more than a decade, including the enormous, six-paneled work Pangea, 2010, which took 20 hours to install in Mestre’s New York home.
“I first met Bosco in Barcelona. Later, I went to his studio where he showed me his work. This was twelve years ago. He moves around a lot. He’s lived in Tokyo, Madrid, Berlin, Mexico City, Paris and now Brooklyn. I find it interesting, someone who moves a lot, you can see the influences from these different places in his work.
The most distinctive part about his work is the texture — it’s essentially three-dimensional. He works like a sculptor, laying the painting on the floor. For materials, he uses sawdust mixed with glue and pure pigment. He then lets it dry, and it starts to crack, which takes a long time, one or two months for each painting, though it depends on where he is and the weather, the humidity or dryness. At the beginning, he used rougher materials, now they’re thinner, but always with the same philosophy.
A few years ago he made these rock sculptures. He drills inside a volcano in Mexico and removes a piece of rock, which is very, very heavy. He glazes it and puts it in an oven. It’s very difficult because for maybe every twenty rocks, he gets one or two successes, the rest explode. He did a beautiful show of these pieces at the Bronx Museum a few years ago.
I have a few of his works. Pangea is made of six different panels. It took a month to dry. All together, it measures about thirteen by forty feet. It took twenty hours to install; they had to cut into the ceiling.
I have actually decided to gift the painting to the new Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), which opens in December. I will miss it, for sure. The energy it gives to the space is impossible to replace.”
New paintings by Sodi will be on view at Pace London from September 6 to October 4 and several of the volcano rocks will be on view at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England, as part of the Sotheby’s selling exhibition “Beyond Limits” from Sept. 9 to Oct. 27.
