The Mysterious and Uniquely Awesome Xul Solar

Solar´s unique boardgame: PanajedrezOne of my first days in Buenos Aires, I visited the Museo Xul Solar. For those of you who don´t know (and I´d imagine it´s almost all of you) Xul Solar was a true boss. A close friend of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Solar was not just on, but was the cutting edge in 1930s Buenos Aires. He was a painter, philosopher, writer, inventor, and all around baller. The museum, which lies just a few blocks away from the NYU campus, is actually in part of his old apartment building. While small and relatively unknown among the city´s main museums, the Museo Xul Solar is actually quite fascinating. Comprised of completely of his paintings, writings, and inventions, one can truly get a sense of what kind of a man Xul Solar was. For example, many of his paintings´ titles are in a language that he invented called "neocriollo", which is basically a mix of Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, and some other strange words. Additionally, there is the one and only "Panajedrez" set, a chess-like boardgame ("Pan" meaning worldly and "ajedrez" meaning chess) that Solar invented. It´s complex pieces and board, consisting of many different numbers, leters, and zodiac symbols, looks like something truly out of this world. What´s more is that he not only created to board and pieces, but he actually invented a complex set of rules for the game. It´s known to have involved knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, and some other fields, but since he was the only one who knew all the rules, it´s not exactly known how to be played today. Along with his invented boardgame, he also created an organ type instrument, in which the keys were replaced by different colored pieces of wood, and Solar created his own way of writing music according to the colored keys. In short, this guy basically lived in his own world.

Studying his work and looking back on his importance is incredibly awesome. The museum is set up in such a way that I truly felt like a was getting a look into the life of Solar and into the intellectual scene of Buenos Aires in the first few decades of the 20th century. While it might not be for everyone, especially if you´ve only got a little bit of time in Buenos Aires and you want to check out a bigger museum like the MALBA, I would highly recommend Museo Xul Solar for anyone who wants to check out the work of an amazingly unique individual.