Lot 224: Alejandro Xul Solar (Argentinian 1887-1963)

Alejandro Xul Solar (Argentinian 1887-1963)
Ascención
signed 'X.' (lower left) with a certificate of authenticity signed by Jorge Natalio Povarché on Galería Rubbers label (on the verso)
watercolor on brown paper
6¼ x 4¾ in. (16 x 12 cm.)
Executed in 1918.

Private collection, Buenos Aires.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

An esoteric visionary and occultist, Xul Solar charted a sui generis path between symbolism and expressionism throughout a career defined by his imaginative genius and an extravagantly original poetic language. As a young artist, Solar spent fourteen years in Europe (1912-24), traveling between his mother's ancestral home in Zoagli, near Genoa, and the major artistic capitals of France, Germany and Italy. Like fellow Argentines Alfredo Guttero, whom he saw in Paris, and his good friend and occasional traveling companion Emilio Pettoruti, Solar found spiritual kinship with the European avant-garde whose work he encountered for the first time. During this formative period, the artist supplemented the formal influences of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based artist group led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, with an intense, personal study of the mystical world, making contact with the magical fraternity Astrum Argentum, with London's Theosophical Society, and in Stuttgart with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy.

Solar's intuitive feeling for syncretic divinities and myriad occultist traditions would manifest itself in works throughout his career, in which symbols become avatars for personal and universal astral visions. His idiosyncratic vision first began to appear in works from this period, curator Patricia Artundo has noted, in which "what is formal submits to the exteriorization of its inner life and of this new world whose exploration has begun: angels are there (not necessarily those marked by the Judeo-Christian tradition), as are the religious subjects, in addition to direct contact with divinity, or life after death."(1) In Ascension, Solar depicts disembodied, dreaming heads in the clutches of circling reptilian birds, the sinuous shapes of flowing, raven-colored tresses and serpentine bodies coiling harmoniously as one. Divine beings beginning their ascension upward, they embody the artist's search for spiritual truths and mystic union. Their liminal state of passage is reinforced by the velvety quality of the black and brown pigments, which Solar blends masterfully into the picture surface, subtly shading the metamorphosis of time and cosmic space.

1) P. M. Artundo, "Working Papers: An Introduction to a Xul Solar Retrospective," in Xul Solar: Visiones y revelaciones, Buenos Aires: Malba--Colección Costantini, 2005, 191-92.