Diana de Solares: Homage to the Triangle
To stand before the art of Diana de Solares is not simply an act of pure visual observation, but also implies placing oneself within and becoming part of an ongoing creative process — one that has its beginnings in her living environment, primarily in the silence of her studio, and its continuation and aftermath in the sensitive and spiritual perception of an artist who contemplates, experiments, and transforms a posteriori. Each one of these moments is strictly necessary for the work to be complete, for it to be a “work” in all its dimensions.
Diana has noted it on several occasions. She requires various and diverse external stimuli, which she explores and sources abundantly in Antigua Guatemala, the city she inhabits, to set that process in motion. This stage consists of becoming fully aware of her surroundings, not only visually but above all physically, and beginning to identify interrelationships between all those elements that will later entail the very content of her works. And so they parade before her gaze and her senses, nourishing them. Nature and its elements and atmospheric phenomena, fleeting, slow, and barely perceptible; everyday tools, sometimes culled from the street; the colors of the markets, festivals, and buses in the outskirts of the city; the structure and tonalities of vernacular architecture; and all manner of found objects that have the potential to become parts of her creations. Throughout this process, Diana assigns an essential role to the subconscious as the site of the instinctual accumulation of sensory and intellectual experiences, which nonetheless emerge a posteriori and are essential to establishing associations. Nothing is deliberate.
A foundational component of these works is color, unavoidable when one deals with painting. Diana employed it cautiously in her early days in the late 1980s. In Guatemala, there was a prejudice against the seductive power of color, associated then with an exoticism and primitivism from which most artists wanted to escape to avoid stigma. But she later realized that she needed color to connect with the world, because the world itself is color — the masses of people, of bodies, her own environment, was color. Color was “a path toward a more humanist art,” in the words of Carlos Cruz Díez, whose work also involves a geometry that is humanized, never cold. She arrived at the conviction that “an entity without color is a field divorced from human life, since we live surrounded by colors.” Diana also understands color as something that does not simply “exist” but rather occurs — it stems from life, from light; it embeds itself in the subconscious and then emerges in all its plenitude. To bring color to structure, or rather to interpret color structurally, has been one of the artist’s enduring pursuits and conquests.
Relying on this endless corpus of perceptions, ideas, and colors, the next stage is for these objects and elements, pure living matter, interconnected and contaminated among each other, to pass through her sensory, emotional, and intellectual filter — viscerally, so as to be translated into the formally abstract and recurrently minimalist language, devoid of detail, that is inseparable from her temperament. Structure-abstraction-color. This act of “translating” her explored worlds is not immediate. On the contrary, it is the result of a patient and slow process requiring meditation and extreme care — the very same pause that the spectator will require in order to access them.
Despite the feeling of control brought about by this process, Diana allows a constant space for improvisation, knowing that accidents often give way to wonderful findings. She thus leaves the door open to new, unexpected, unusual and spontaneous visions, She links this in part to her understanding of “chaos,” which she considers fundamental to coexist in harmony with nature and transition toward new paradigms.
When working on a project or series, parallel to her visual practice, color, spatial, and formal relationships occur simultaneously with the construction of ideas. At the end of a day at the studio, the process continues to develop at a subconscious level. It’s time for reading — about color, perception, and philosophy, areas in which she starts discovering synchronicities, those temporal coincidences of events a priori unrelated but semantically convergent that Carl Jung described. This is her way of understanding what she is building. She begins to make sense of the colors she is using, the proportions, and the dimensions of the works. It’s a method through which to present, pronounce, or explain herself before the world. What we are describing is a project of discovery, not so much of production preceded by planning.
Even in her strict two-dimensionality, Diana’s works are subject to the concept of spatialization. Once her works are realized, she considers it absolutely essential to conceive of them within a specific, architectural site, which not only transforms their meaning but also, along with the gaze of the spectator, places conditions on their autonomy. She understands that exhibition spaces must be activated and transformed into a kind of theater, a participatory environment that stimulates contemplation. This is where the work acquires its complete form and, in some ways, generates a new work altogether. Because outside of the studio context, her works are not merely in a “space” but rather have found a “place,” an environment, an ecosystem, expanding their meaning. Therein lies one of Diana’s endeavors, that which brings her to ask herself again and again a key question, the engine of her living and creative process: Where are we when we are in the world?
The “intensification” of experience — never its simplification — is intrinsic to the abstract and minimalist concept of Diana de Solares’s production. Mies Van der Rohe’s “less is more” approach; reducing and systematizing to arrive at the purity of the real. A journey to the very seed of something in order to reach its essence. And even, in some cases, an orientation toward ancestral cultures, for whom geometric forms are primordial and allow us to connect with the entrails, the depths of things. The past that becomes present.
Architecture and space, geometry and structure; these have been the building blocks of our American rationality since our origins. Volcanoes and pyramids along the same sacred thread — two mountains, one made by nature and the other by the human hand. Josef Albers, pioneer of a geometric tradition that arose from the reinterpretation of pre-Columbian art, saw it decades ago. Albers “sees” the pyramids and re-creates them from above (but also looking downward, toward the underworld), This is one of the seeds of his “Homage to the Square”. Diana’s approach to volcanoes is similar, but she visualizes them at street level and classifies them as if they were “Homage to the Triangle,” though also moving toward the obscure, diving inside them, approaching their core, reaching a high symbolic density.
Volcanoes allowed Diana to return to the spirit of some of the works she showed in the 2017 exhibition “Vulcanidad / Vulcanicity,” picking up the thread of this exploration in a permanent cycle of eruption and irruption. As Alma Ruiz wrote in the exhibition catalog at the time, “Rather than referring directly to the volcano, Diana employs its figure as a metaphor that extends across a vibrant oeuvre, featuring sharp angles, slopes, inclines, peaks, and tensions between lines, forms, and colors that are still part of a landscape — her personal landscape.”
The final result is a diptych: two volcanoes that meet, linked by their vertices to create a common territory. The configuration of these diptychs is, in fact, the product of discovery, of the fusions of lines, triangles, spatial relations, and colors. The permanent concept of duality, of two worlds that meet, gives way to a rapprochement and encounter between the highbrow — which she encounters primarily through design and architecture magazines — and the popular, which she coexists with on a daily basis. She is absolutely immersed in both and they interest her at the same level.
The pandemic, in her view, sharpened her perception of nature significantly. This nature is in constant flux and transfiguration. And her perception privileges certain sounds, of which she is constantly aware. Sounds that go unnoticed and emerge from the movement of nature itself: the noises of the garden, the swaying of the trees and plants, the whistling of the wind, the sounds of volcanoes. A landscape is imprinted on the subconscious, joining the other elements — the architectures of nature and those produced by human hands — to represent it visually, to internalize it, and to reproduce it in the form of artworks. And this strengthens her most essential tool: Her sense of space.
More recently the symbolism generated by this creative process has begun to manifest a propensity toward a spiritual rather than embodied place. She began to work with magazines she amassed in her studio, cutting out, combining, and finally producing a large body of collages that is of a mainly cosmic, atmospheric, and spiritual. This is the precise opposite of the earthly — a paradox, since Diana has always felt rooted in the earth, closer to objects than to concepts. Among these works is a collage in which Henrique Faria identified the heliconias in her garden, a reference she was not thinking of at the outset and that gave her a glimpse of the logic of the subconscious. The work is composed almost exclusively of triangular shapes. A work that is totally abstract in which it is nevertheless possible to identify elements of reality.
The notion of collage is essential to understanding the work of Diana in all its breadth, since her connection to the world is crystallized in this practice. Her job involves collecting things that are scattered, that appear unrelated, and her challenge consists of finding a way to amalgamate them, to make them fit together through some analogy, a task that seduces her from a humanist perspective. Because Diana de Solares compellingly conceives of the world as a collage, pursuing the generation of new energies, starting from the fragmentation of forms and their activation by combining and assembling them through abstract canons. If, as she says, “a living being is a construction of fragments,” the entire long process of her work is ultimately nothing more than a path to create new entities and to present herself to the world through them.