Xul Solar

Xul Solar was an interesting man, and a good friend of the great Jorge Luis Borges, and even appeared as a minor character in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (although his use of a duodecimal system in one of his projects may also have inspired the same system said to be used by Herbert Ashe, the engineer and friend of Borges' father in that same story). Solar's paintings are the subject of this fairly short post, as I was having a look at them today in the course of some of my research. Important biographical information on Solar is available at wikipedia, but some interesting facts were his creation of different languages, and his paintings of utopia and cityscapes which were bizarre - some floating on flying ships of some description, others in strange settings and locations. He used mostly watercolours in his works, and used striking colours which call attention to the eye. Two of my favourites that I have spotted so far are below. I enjoy the use in both cases of symbols and flags, and the first is particularly poignant. He had an association with Aleister Crowley, man of magick of the twentieth century, and certainly a very strange figure indeed, who was also said to have a relationship with Fernano Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet. Crowley was impressed by Solar's new languages, one of which was called Neo-criollo (New Creole) and his invention of a game known as Pan-chess, using a duodecimal system which was to be played on a 13x13 board, the same duodecimal number system which also underpinned another of his invented languages, Pan. To tie this in with my other interests, he also proposed changes to the game of football, which included adding more balls, dividing the pitch into sectors and replacing the numbers on players shirts with letters, which would eventually form words. Overall, he was pretty interesting, and I'll try to update this with more information when I have a chance at some stage in the future.