Leader of Snakes

Xul Solar was essentially an esoteric who thought and conveyed his ideas in visual terms. His work brings together the search for a superior—that is, religious or spiritual— universal knowledge and the expression of his inner world. In 1920, his watercolors begin to manifest the relationship between word and image. At that same time, he was inventing the artificial language he called Neocriollo. This creation was central to his project of the spiritual unification of Latin America, a territory he envisioned as the physical space for the new man. That was the framework for his involvement in the group surrounding the avant-garde Martín Fierro journal, launched in 1924, and for his friendship with Jorge Luis Borges (they shared a passion for language and languages, the I Ching, the kabbalah, and mystical poets like William Blake). His watercolors are a visual transcription of some of his mystical visions, where superimposed characters and scenes are constructed with multiple colors, signs, graphic elements, and geometric and organic shapes.