The adorable work of Mexican Ricardo Solís depicts a personal version of the myth of animal creation. Solís draws on his child’s imagination and transposes on canvas his whimsical and amusingly bizarre hypothesis on why animal species look the way they are.
According to Solís‘s version, the armadillo’s shells is the result of men’s labour. Just like if they were intent in building a complex building, little workers appear busy in co-ordinating the operations required to assemble the scutes of the animal.
Where imagination rules every theory is possible and plausible, even the one that attributes the red colour of a bird to its being deliberately fed on and covered with chilli, then smashed and compacted by little workers. It is the paradox of science, which proves that the external colour of an animal depends on what the animal eats.
Solís‘s draughtsmanship allows him to execute his paintings in a style immediately reminiscent of the watercolours illustrating zoological treatises in XIXth century. But his work subverts any pretence of scientific evidence and his imaginary universe is in actual fact closer Jules Verne‘s literary world.
I particularly love Solís’s two versions of the hippo. In the first one, the hippo is represented in all its real weight while trapped on a precarious pedestal. In the second one, the hippo is created by inflation and it lightly hovers towards the sky while people try to hold it down with ropes.
I find in Ricardo Solís‘s art an effective cure in a world more and more depleted of any sense of wonder, fantasy and poetry.
To see more of Ricardo Solís‘s fantasy tales of creation visit his website here
All images courtesy of Ricardo Solís.
via Beautiful Decay and Lost at E Minor.
Observatory Mansions (Italian Version)
Observatory Mansions 