Sacha Sosno Biography
Alexandre Joseph Sosnowsky, a notary under the pseudonym Sacha Sosno, was born in Marseille in 1937. In 1948, while still a teenager, he met the Fauve artist Henry Matisse in Nice, whose violent and provocative use of color left a lasting impression on of him. Sosno also met Yves Klein and Arman in 1956, whose work had a major influence on his art, leading him to destroy his abstract works. During his military service in Toulouse he participated in an excavation campaign during which the largest French site of Gallo-Roman tombs was discovered. In the early 1960s Sosno worked as a photographer for the press and for some local television, becoming a war reporter in the conflicts in Ireland, Bangladesh and Biafra. After these intense experiences, Sosno returned to painting with the series of "Obliterated Photographs", portraits, self-portraits, houses printed on canvas and partially hidden by layers of acrylic colors in the form of arrows, rectangles or simply overlapping brushstrokes. In 1969 he moved to the Montparnasse district of Paris, where he approached the Art Sociologique movement, together with Bernard Teyssèdre, Gina Pane, Juan Rabascall, Jean-Paul Thénot, Alain Fisher, Fred Forest, Serge Oldenbourg, Nil Yalter . The group, each with their own style, undertook to analyze the links between art and media society, thematizing the process of massification, the fracture between art and life and the isolation of the individual. In 1974 Sosno sold his Paris studio and bought a sailboat to cross the Atlantic Ocean with his partner Maschat. He has exhibited in Porto and Caracas. Between 1993 and 1996 he traveled to Japan, Korea, Canada and Greece, creating sculptures that represented the void obtained through rationality and rigor, exploiting the archetypes of ancient art, from the Greeks to Michelangelo, to awaken the collective memory and remember how our daily life is rooted in classical Western thought. In 2000 he won the national competition, financed by the French Ministry of Culture, for the construction of the Central Library of Nice. Together with architects Yves Bayard and Francis Chapus he designed a monumental aluminum sculpture called Tête au carrée, made using shipbuilding techniques. The sculpture, Sosno's greatest achievement, appears to be the first inhabited sculpture in the world. At the same time he conceived a new pictorial cycle called "Opéras", which used the apropiations/obliterations of theatrical sets. The large canvases represent forests, landscapes and images hidden by the casual fall of a curtain. The use of brightly colored geometric patterns hides the integrity of the work. Sosno's works are currently featured throughout the world.
