Contrapunto de montes y Yara (Counterpoint of Mountains and Yara)

After coming into contact with the European avant-garde at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Argentine painter Xul Solar constructed his own pictorial language which weaved different artistic tendencies of the time like Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism into his personal interests in astrology, the occult sciences, philosophy, music, religion and language.
From 1940, the pictorial space in his works was opened up through the use of landscapes which repeatedly included melodic, rhythmically undulating mountains, ladders and stairs, flags and architectural structures presented as signs with semiotic qualities in search of some esoteric content in the outside world. Solar turned a cosmic gaze upon the world around him, showing a marked interest in the expressive capacity of common objects.
Contrapunto de montes y Yara (Counterpoint of Mountains and Yara) is not a narrative work; rather, it establishes a kind of visual symbology, in silent evocation of certain perfect zones of the subconscious. It thus becomes an allegory for the inner landscape that endorses a mystical perception of the real world, heavily influenced by the artist’s interest in the Kabbalah and his intention of using painting as a vehicle for communication that had a universal reach, accepting, like Jorge Luis Borges, his situation as “Citizen of the Universe”.

Ruth Gallego Fernández