beings but there is a very human presence behind them, a conductor in this visual orchestra and that is a presence, the feminine manifestation of Solange Knopf herself, her dreams, her fears, her joys that invest these drawings with a living power that is not classic, that moves on the savage edges of our own dreams and mythos. She may have depicted a world but she is the guide to that world. If it is a narrative it is created by the one who lives it as it unscrolls, the result of mature vision to express the nearly intangible, the nearly ineffable. She will guide you through its canals in a gondola of smooth movement and grace but she will not explain all of it to you. She is happy to keep it as a Mystery to herself as well. She will not protect you from the darkness, but she will unveil some of its secrets and its terrible beauty and allow you to form your own conclusions. There is horror, there is pain, there is ecstasy and there is the timeless miasma of numinous history. She is still in the center, absorbing it. This is a different kind of narrative. More of a chant than a story. The disconnects cause the tensions that draw us in. The baseline of my own narrative here is that it doesn't matter to me at all whether the work of Solange Knopf is called Outsider, Art brut, Art Singulier, Contemporary Art or Visionary art. None of these labels can or will change a thing. I stand before the scrolls of Spirit Codex and realize that I am looking at monumental drawings of aspects of the female psyche that I have not seen sung this way anywhere before. That while the canons of the art world were imploding on themselves Solange Knopf was in her studio home channeling her own dreams of universal portents, visualizing icons of female beings from her own rich interior life, breaking free of the chains of art world branding to offer us exquisitely colored and drawn, dangerous, personal images that are simultaneously strong and fragile, images along the path of an extraordinary visionary process. Randall Morris NYC May, 2014
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