MAY 10TH, 2022
When I was nine years old, I remember noticing a dark-covered book that otherwise would've passed unappreciated. The title read Extraordinary Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. I would not have imagined that the content of the stories was far from what I could conceive. However, I did not feel intimidated. My eyes opened upon a penetrating narrative that was uncomfortable and simultaneously fantastic.
Years later, I had the same experience with other works: Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror, Heinrich Hoffman's Struwwelpeter and Roald Dahl's various tales. Those surreal and wonderful scenarios with a grotesque touch of sobering would make you uncomfortable. Still, you couldn't stop reading would portray an incredible saturation of vivid colours, picturesque characters, or talking objects.
I feel that sensation again for the first time in a while. Three visual artists whose work I consider illustrated tales consume me, like getting to know short stories you would read repeatedly; stories capable of sending a shiver running down your spine as you experience the main character's anguish, loss, or living in the subtlety of ephemeral beauty.
The Swan Lake by Nikolina Petolas
Firstly, Nikolina Petolas. Each character depicts lives in etheric worlds, whose contrasting colours have an air of nostalgia. Her scenes could have been 18th-century French Gobelins decorations, but no, they are wonders of this century. Her works are elegant with a light touch of darkness.
Matt Dangler, I've followed his work for a long time. From the first moment, I remember that I felt a fantastic experience where undoubtedly something sinister had happened or was going to happen. Or where there is simply a distortion of the original version of a tale that once made you smile but now makes you shudder. Voluminous shapes, colourful scenery, and striking looks; broadly speaking, one could see oneself in any of these characters, and you will always empathize or identify with one of them.
The Landing
The Banquet
Guillermo Lorca García, a gifted Chilean painter whose paintings are realistic yet naïve dreams, until you encounter threatening elements: animals that could be custodians or predators. The pastel light is interrupted by blood pigmented with blue and red in one extreme case.
Each of them has brought to the world of digital art the beauty of extraordinary narrations full of tangible and intangible illusory notes on canvas and in NFTs, reproducing sensations and stories that can only be found in literature.
