Lot 43: Alejandro Xul Solar (Argentinian 1887-1963)

Alejandro Xul Solar (Argentinian 1887-1963)
Muros
signed 'X.' (lower right)
tempera on paper
13½ x 19 5/8 in. (34.3 x 50 cm.)
Executed in 1944.

J. López Anaya, Xul Solar: Una utopía espiritualista, Buenos Aires, Fundación Pan Klub, 2002, p. 132, no. 133 (illustrated).

Galería Rubbers, Buenos Aires.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Natalio J. Porvaché.
Solar temporarily abandoned color during the early 1940s, reducing his palette to somber grays and beiges and focusing on the cataclysmic feeling of stark, architectural spaces modeled on ancient ruins, summits and staircases. Muros was inspired by a series of visions that Solar painted between 1943 and 1944 that marked his response to a critical moment during the Second World War in which the Axis powers threatened to take control. "These visions evoke the forces of good and evil and the human condition in the world," Mario H. Gradowczyk has explained. "They are worlds of unearthly dreams whose geographies are articulated by mysterious mountains and bottomless abysses, out of which these opposing worlds emerge quite as dauntingly as those narrated by Borges in the cosmogony of Hakim."(1) That sense of impending apocalypse haunts the barren architecture of Muros, whose narrowing precipices become ominous metaphors for the moral hazards of war.

Among Solar's bleakest landscapes, Muros is a labyrinthine maze of zigzagging walls that extend into a black horizon, connected intermittently by simple arches. A play of allegorical and tonal contrasts--between sheer verticality and infinite depth, inky black and chalky white--the image is visually striking, its forms heavy with contemporary meaning. The jagged walls appear to gain elevation as they move into the distance, in a sense taking on the properties of Solar's more familiar staircases and inviting the viewer to travel along their treacherous paths as they taper to blunt points deep within the painting. The graphic linearity of the work, defined by the sharp lines and fine, subtle shading, heightens the intensity of Solar's Manichaean symbolism, the eternal struggle between good and evil. Though bereft of figures, Muros is nevertheless one of Solar's most humane images: the crisp, colorless walls suggest a path to spiritual enlightenment, and thus implicitly to the just end of the war.

1) M. H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar, Buenos Aires, Ediciones ALBA, 1994, 170.