Piedra de Sol, ¿afinidades entre pintura y poesía?

Abstract

This article explores the relations between painting and poetry through the analysis of a work by the Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo entitled Piedra de sol (1974); this painting takes its title from the poem of the same name by Octavio Paz, published for the first time in 1957. The article offers the reader a rigorous analysis of the plastic dimension of Szyszlo's work, since in that delimited-textual surface the inherent association with Paz's poem comes to be questioned. A “visual hypothesis” nourished by several different observations of the painting Piedra de sol attempts to reveal a complex task of translation through which the painter accedes to tradition via modernity, or what Paz called “modern tradition”. In this way the painter manages to distance himself from the homonymous poem and thus create his own figures. From this perspective, the painting overcomes all associations inherent to poetry and proposes as a center of discussion the transforming nature of the plastic language.