Delia Solari and the Music of the Living Light

By Morgan Powell

The geometric rationality of theory serves a quest for universal meaning communicated on the canvas primarily by Solari’s dialogue with this life-giving light, a light that seems to pour out of the painting, illuminating it with the multifaceted and multicolored brilliance of a child’s kaleidoscope. In this tension between a childlike fascination with an infinite variation of forms and colours and the strict control of a geometrically, almost mathematically conceived composition Solari seeks her theme, the unity of a rational and a sensual reality.

Delia Solari elevated this tension to the order of a method as early as 1989, with the publication of Aesthetic Statements (Ediciones Gaglianone), her own manifesto on the art of painting. There she acknowledges her full debt to the tradition of Mondrian, Kandinski and Klee, and offers her interpretation of the dizzying progression of twentieth-century artistic movements from which she sees her work emerging: a drastic oscillation between two poles as the artist in his new creative freedom explores the extremes of the sensual-subjective and the geometric-objective. It is characteristic of Solari’s highly intellectual approach that she devises a ponderous terminology to express these opposed directions in her own work, dividing it into “sensitive” and “rational planimetric structuralism.” But the book shows Solari to be an articulate and an expressive writer, an artist fully capable of putting her pictorial work, its foundations as well as its aspirations, into words.

All the more eloquent, then, the refusal of language, whether verbal or figural, that her work represents. There is undeniable commitment and conviction shimmering from behind the translucent planes of her compositions, an urgent desire to communicate an inner experience that is perhaps the most immediately arresting feature of her work; it is also the feature that puts her in a class apart from contemporaries and predecessors of the constructivist and other formally geometric schools of abstract painting.

Solari’s oeuvre documents a lifelong pursuit of the idea that essentially human and intrinsically personal statements can be made with only line, color and light-much as a composer evokes an entire spectrum of human emotions and even narrative progressions through sound, rhythm and acoustic volume alone. The analogy with music is by no means the invention of this critic, nor is it merely a reflection of Solari’s avowed affection for the thought and work of Vasili Kandinski – whom she quotes when she writes, “Music has always been the art which has used its own means to express the artist´s internal life and to create a life of its own, and not to represent or reproduce natural phenomena.” Music is rather a guiding principle and foundational experience of this artist’s life and art: first given a musical education, it was only as an adult and a mother than Solari found her artistic vocation in painting. In her studio she works to the continuous accompaniment of music; it provides her with both a “sensitive” and a “rational” source of inspiration. The language of painting is not a figural language for Solari, but rather a musical language, the language of contrasts and harmonies that exists on a level of human perception that is presumed universal. Whether this universal level exists or not is not her question; her life’s work is instead testimony to the power of believing that it does; the creative force and vigor of her paintings are convincing witnesses in themselves.

These paintings intimate a “music of the spheres” captured by the inner ear of the artist and transformed into space, color and light; they whisper of a shimmering, tinkling mathematical unity that pervades and illuminates the chaos of human experience – but neither negates nor obviates it. Every painting has an unmistakable center of gravity that is most often also its source of light, a light that emanates from beyond the superimposed planes of color and appears to produce the painting itself: reflected and refracted, bouncing and rebounding from one plane to the next, it produces translucent colors in complementary hues along carefully controlled tonal scales. This light is the protagonist of the painting, its true creator. It reveals the dialogue between the artist and her inspiration, and through the refusal, inherent in her geometric forms, of all particularity, delivers the suggestion of a transcendent creator that is not, finally, a statement, but a fact of the viewer’ s experience of the painting itself.

Finally then, Solari’s endlessly exuberant variation on the geometric coupling of light and color becomes something like a subtle argument for the existence of God. In this way, quizzically, if not paradoxically, Solari shows us where the trajectory of contemporary abstract art reaches back beyond the mimetic revolution of the Renaissance to the spiritual representation of the medieval world. Her paintings are not windows in the sense of the Renaissance theoretician of perspective, Alberti illusory openings on the phenomenal world -, but rather in the opposed sense of the stained glass of the medieval cathedral: they are not openings, but screens. They mediate an infinite depth and Light that lies beyond their plane of existence. Their color and line serves to refract and filter a pure light, a divine light, such that it becomes perceptible to human eyes. Such “windows” communicate the primary refraction of the unknowable into form and sensory experience, capturing the basic elements universal to that experience: line, plane, color, and depth; while the combination of these in tum suggests the tactile and the olfactory, the most content-specific of our sensory impressions. Solari’s windows, her “planimetric structuralist compositions”, are much akin to visual realizations of the essence of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and at the same time unmistakably permeated with the visual idiom of our nascent third millennium. But this eloquent female voice in the predominantly male world of abstract art displays a much stronger affinity still with a different voice of the middle Ages: that of Hildegard of Bingen. The prolific oeuvre of the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” too, was produced out of inner commitment to serve as the musical instrument, or “voice of the living light.” She recorded her experiences in voluminous treatises shaped by a complex, visually laden language. But like Delia Solari she was no pure spiritualist. The visionary, theologian, composer, physician – and possibly even painter – was no less multi-faceted and no less fascinated by the phenomenal world than was the quintessential “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci. It is fitting, then, that Solari’s paintings seem to offer an expression in visual form of Hildegard’s extended mystical – and musical – dialogue. Hildegard is best known today not for the Latin treatises of her own highly individual brand of theology, but rather for her no less original expression in the universal language of music. Thus is suggested, finally, a distinctly appropriate title for the oeuvre of her twenty-first century successor: Delia Solari’s dialogue with the music of the Living Light.

Morgan Powell, Pb.D., is an historian of visual and verbal media and
a contributing critic to both the European and American press.