Charlie Sofo presents sometimes small interventions that are large in their conceptual meaning. It is artwork about the art of collecting, observing and displaying forms and materials that sit at the corner of our vision and then re-presenting them as items of wonder and contemplation. Sofo works across mediums and the list of materials he has used speak of the obsessive nature of his practice.

Hair, books, particles, lint, photocopies, lotto cards, erasers saliva, thread, seeds, clothes, actions, grease and grime, rice 100s & 1000s, dog eared pages, sandpaper

It is an art of de-composing, taking something that exists in one state and transforming it into another. It is of work, and discipline, the act of consideration. The architecture of the mouth, taking things in, words, ideas, objects and talk, and expelling them out.

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

– John Ashberry, As one put drunk/into the Packet-boat

When I encountered the work of Charlie Sofo for the first time he was giving the art work away and bringing the meaning of the transaction into question.

Unprepared as viewers and potential benefic- iaries we tried to work out or strategies for engage- ment – should I take one? Or more than one? How do I acquire?

Giving became the artwork and the works themselves become part of the process. By giving us no obligations he delivered the opposite. In a simple generous gesture from the artist he revealed our own sense of selfishness.

It seems as though all of Sofo’s work is about exchanges of this type. Exchanges between not just objects but exchanges between things.

Exchange is the rubric through which you can link all of all of the beautiful moments – of swapping clothes with someone and taking on their form; Finding a piece of someone, their hair, in someone’s else book; chewing the watermelon, spitting the seeds into the hand, laying them out in a grid. Of me and of you – you are everything I am nothing – only wanting to be filled by you, played by you, composed by you.

In a work composed of ordered particles sourced from a carpeted floor we understand the action of lying on the floor peeling back the carpet looking for something. To search, to order, to be, of particles.

Finding the meaning in the slight, the marginal. The search and collection: the discipline of marking marks. Obsessions, patterning, over and over. Of using the personal parts of the body – spit, hair and pockets.

It is art that speaks of working in the gap between all and nothing and finding a place to settle there.

* T.S. Eliot, Coriolan, I. Triumphal March

© Glenn Barkley