TONGUELESS PELICANS

In his 1982 essay, The Solitude of Latin America, Gabriel Garcia Marquez evokes a maiden voyage to the New World, “Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our Southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it, he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons.”

I decided to travel East, in order to discover and describe in a somewhat similar fashion, a visual codex of the peculiar and the profane. This project is a painter’s log of a reverse voyage to the Old World, into the uncanny. A place of many paradoxes; ideals and nightmares, socialism and capitalism, romanticism and realism, scary monsters and super creeps. Leipzig, Germany has come to represent many of these idiosyncrasies.