Xul Solar Exhibition Review

Xul Solar exhibit sheds light on an artist ahead of his time

By PATRICIA C. JOHNSON
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Artist Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari wanted nothing more than a universal language and spaces that would accommodate all beliefs. Until his death in 1963 at age 75, he investigated religion and the occult, architecture, astrology and history. He meditated, wrote his visions in a journal, then described them in watercolors.

He changed his name to Xul Solar, a derivation of lux solaris (sunlight) and a play on his family names.

His pantheistic view incorporated multiple cultures and symbols — from golden-winged angels to the Hindu god Ganesha, the cabala to I Ching and numerology.

The exhibit Xul Solar: Visions and Revelations at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the first in-depth look at his work in this country. The show begins in 1924, when the artist returned to his native Buenos Aires after a dozen years in Europe.

Xul lived in England, France, Italy and places in between, connecting with the European avant-garde, responding especially to German Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) and the Symbolists. The paintings then and until his death are small and decorative, with strong echoes of Paul Klee in their childlike descriptions and bright palette; they’re oddly reminiscent, too, of Italian primitives such as Sassetta. Jorge Luis Borges, with whom Xul published the influential literary magazine Martin Fierro (1924-1927), compared the painter to 18th-century English visionary William Blake.

The works often incorporate words in “neo-criollo,” a language Xul invented by blending Portuguese and Spanish with the idea that a single language would unite all of South America. Subjects include townscapes, churches, fantastic landscapes and figures that include mythic or magical beings, angels to dragons.

Drago (1947) is a landscape in which the principal figure is a curving creature with a body decorated with the flags of South America. It undulates gracefully across a sand-colored background with stars and moons of many colors bouncing around it like beach balls. The flags of England and the United States are relegated to the corners — an inversion of worldview at mid-20th century.

Tlaloc (1923) presents the Aztec god of rain as a Cubist figure in shades of red and magenta wielding pale blue weapons against a golden background. The Náhuatl name Tlaloc and atl, the word for water, float about the indeterminate space.

Exhibition curator Patricia Artundo explained that for Xul, architecture “was a space to gather and commune. He understood that one way to redefine culture is through architecture.”

Examples of how he envisioned it abound. He appropriated the forms of Asian pagodas, pre-Columbian pyramids, European cathedrals and modern multistory dwellings.

Neo Bau (1922) is a six-story apartment building, its title reflecting the geometric simplicity of the Bauhaus style. But it is painted vibrant, joyful colors, as could be found in, say, Brazil.

Iglesia de María, painted in 1954, is constructed from an acrostic in orange and yellow block letters, with spires topped by crosses and quarter moons. The same year he also designed Proyecto fachada para ciudad (Project for a City Facade) in bright colors, defining a futuristic structure that recalls Le Corbusier. He deconstructed it in another watercolor, Proyecto Pan Klu Delta, where cubic spaces rise on stilts from the water’s surface.

His palette is somber in the symbolic Valle Hondo (Deep Valley, 1944). The subject is less architecture than spiritual ascent. Executed in ochre, gray and white, it describes a series of undulating hills pierced by pedimented doorways at various levels and stepladders leading to them. A lone figure is still on the boardwalk at the foothills. The theme of spirituality dominates the period from the mid-1940s to late ’50s, expressed through ghostly female forms and crumbling totems.

Xul assimilated his theosophic bent in games. The exhibit includes his chess game and decks of tarot cards. The latter are wonderfully illustrated minipaintings of magical beings, among them Dogo Ampu, who resembles Anubis, and Sagitr, a two-legged horse with bow and arrow in his human arms. More traditional images include Forza (a woman with a tame lion) and Justie (a woman balancing the scales of justice.)

The common thread in the work, MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez said, “is the artist’s relentless search for philosophical, spiritual and aesthetic understanding of some deeper truth.”

As that old saying goes, the thrill is not in the arrival but in the process of getting there. Xul Solar’s voyage was certainly interesting — even if his images today appear terribly dated.