Alejandro Xul Solar (short for Oscar Agustin Alejandro Schulz Solari) is an Argentine artist from Buenos Aires. In the exhibit of South American artists that we visited in the MALBA, he had a small room with about ten pieces inside. We sat on a bench and sketched some of his work. His use of geometric shapes and earthy colors actually separate him from the artists in the gallery. He uses numbers and letters. His images make it seem like you are in a dream due to faded brown blotches in the background. His art looks strangely Egyptian and is similar in style to Klee, Kandinsky, and Chagall. His preferred medium was water color. Xul Solar was an intellectual who created two languages in addition to his work as an artist. He kept company with the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
To give you an idea of Xul Solar's mind, here is a quote:
"I am a world champion of a game that nobody yet knows called panchess (Panajedrez). I am master of a script that nobody yet reads. I am creator of a technique, of a musical grafía that allows the piano to be studied in a third of the usual time that it takes today. I am director of a theatre that as yet has not begun working. I am creator of a universal language called panlingua based on numbers and astrology that will help people know each other better. I am creator of twelve painting techniques, some of them surrealist, and others that transpose a sensory, emotional world on to canvas, and that will produce in those that listen a Chopin suite, a Wagnerian prelude, or a stanza sung by Beniamino Gigli. I am the creator, and this is what most interests me at the moment, apart from the exhibition of painting that I am preparing, of a language that is desperately needed by Latin America.”
-From Xul Solar’s own writings
After we sketched in the museum we went home and created our own version of a Xul Solar piece in oil pastels.
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