Solve

Following his Conjunctio and Coagula, Orryelle DeFenestre Bascule has now released the third book of his Tela Quadrivium. Printed mostly on black pages, this is a darker vision than presented in the first two books. My first impression is that this is not as good as the first two books, Conjunctio in particular. This is possibly because Conjunctio used a few works that Orryelle had made previously, whereas Solve appears to be mostly art prepared solely for this book. On the whole, I find his images fascinating, largely, to be honest, because he has no compunctions about presenting nudity and sexual images. I mean, let's face it, if you're an occultist of any worth whatseoever, you're going to want to deal with things that bring primal energies to bear, and sex certainly has a primal energy. However, its one thing to include sex, its something completely different to do it in a way that heightens the energy, not simply give cheap thrills.  Orryelle in his books gives a flavor of his life as an artist, running amok across the globe, expanding his horizons in every direction possible.
Fulgur, of course, is the perfect publisher for this important work; they have pushed the limits of what it is possible to accomplish, in terms of using gold ink, black paper, and very much co-creating the works with Orryelle. In Solve, for example, I remember one page with shiny black ink on a more matt black page; you can only really see the text if you tilt the page. Robert Ansell is to be heartily congratulated on getting this together. Another fantastic collaboration.

I'm not going to comment on the text, because its going to take me some time to come to grips with the series. The images, however, sink easily into the layers of one's subconcious. Sabbaths worth attending. Note that the large bright patch in the image is an artifact of my photography; buy the book to see the unadulterated version.