Fiordo 1943

Xul Solar made this painting, called Fiordo, sometime around 1963, presumably with paint on paper. What grabs me here is the brown-ness, how the forms of the land are built up from earthy colors and soft shapes. Everything feels rounded, corporeal. And then these hard-edged white lines cut through the scene, making staircases, ladders, sharp angles against the curves. There’s something so strange and wonderful about the surface, like a memory of a real place, dissolving. Look at the figure standing in the doorway on the lower left. It’s a small detail, easy to miss, but it anchors the whole composition. It suggests narrative. Like maybe we’re meant to follow one of those staircases to some unknown destination. I see something of Giorgio de Chirico in this, a similar sense of dream logic and spatial ambiguity. It’s a world where meaning is always just out of reach, and that’s what makes it so compelling.