Rock my Eden
Pato Bosich
Recent Paintings
Barn Bradenstoke presents recent paintings by Pato Bosich. An invigorating clash of distant mythically-charged antiquities, offset by urban contemporary environments of London.
Pato Bosich, born in Chile in 1978, is a London-based contemporary artist. He has exhibited in London, Europe, Latin America and the United States, including the Nationalmuseum – Stockholm, Ateneum Art Museum – Finland, The Courtauld Institute and London University in London, in Chile at the MSSA and MAM Museums, Porter Contemporary in New York, Jano Arts and Fundació Catalunya Amèrica in Barcelona and Sberbank University in Moscow.
In 2019 he collaborated on art projects with McCaslin Advisory and Marie von Papen. Over the last five years he has created an ongoing body of work in dialogue with the British Museum entitled “Antiquity”.

Pato Bosich in his London Studio, 2021
»…like a prism where a cross of voices takes place: the intensity and moods of my childhood landscape, the South of Chile, with renaissance and antiquity.«
Pato Bosich
The forest
2020
details



Chile
photo © Pato Bosich

Selfportrait as the studio at night
2020
detail

© Pato Bosich 2020

»In many ancient cultures, the supernatural and the fantastic are accessed through the qualities of the animal. Encoded in my work are the metamorphoses of both - animal and human, and in particular the female form.«
Pato Bosich
Pato Bosich’s female figure is not a true-to-life image, but a timeless carrier of sensation that flows into the composition through the painter’s gestural expression. Due to the subdued blurred colouring, the scene is bathed in a ghostly half twilight, a stage-like atmosphere. The dramatic light-dark contrast dissolves into an “explosion” of colour, contour and image-making itself: an embrace of painting per se.
Exploding woman
2020
Acrylic and oil on wood
35 x 20.5 cm

Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Equestrian monument in an ancient landscape of ruins
around 1750
CC BY-SA 4.0 Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
“All the different periods and artists from the European tradition are contemporary to me: they are alive, and I invite them into my circus.”
Pato Bosich
Where the past is present: the latter half of the eighteenth century was an era of contradictions. Unparalleled luxury and abject poverty, absolute monarchs and republican pamphleteers, unquestioned faith and reasoned scepticism, Rococo fantasy and classical purity – an epoch that witnessed the splendid, waning hours of the old order and the violent birth of the modern age and a curious mingling of archaeology and fantasy.

Johann Heinrich Füssli
The Artist Moved to Despair by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments
1778/79
Red chalk on sepia wash
Kunsthaus Zürich
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
»My latest book revolves around the horse - it has become a sort of magical dictionary of symbols and actions to me, like a prophecy or a talisman.«
Pato Bosich

Woman and horse form a unique symbiosis, as old as the history of humanity itself.
Iconically charged with timeless meaning, Fransisco de Goya deconstructs the powers of the “old system” on its way to a better future. Pato Bosich’s interest and devotion for art history is broad, allowing critics to propose sources for the painting’s elements in antique, classical, and Renaissance art as well as their manifold later reception.
Francisco de Goya
Kidnapping Horse
„Los Proverbios“ series, No. 10
1815–1824
Etching and Aquatint
Prado Madrid
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hubert Robert
The Fire of Rome
1785
Musee des Beaux-Arts Andre Malraux
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Intense experience of natural disaster was followed by the coming into vogue of a profound romanticism of ruins – a virtuosic celebration of an irresistible beauty arising from “chaos”, accompanied by a sublime aesthetic, alternating between fascination and horror as if flushed out of the latest video game. The light of the Enlightenment sublimated into a seductive beauty contrasted with the other side of reason: irrationality, nightmare and fear.
But Hegel already knew that the owl Minerva only begins its flight when dusk falls…
»Irreconcilable imaginative pulsations drive me forth; they pulsate and merge to a beautiful Frankenstein - made out of fragments. To be carried away by the interconnections of the elements… this sense of adventure and journey is essential to me, it feeds the visionary energy within my work.«
Pato Bosich