Wonderland and Looking Glass Alices by Dušan Kállay

All pictures by  Dušan Kállay.

The work of the illustrator Dusan Kállay is really a treasure. His images are a delightful challenge for the eyes and the imagination. His Alice is exuberant and bizarre, charming and ambiguous, rustic and delicate. His characters invites me to delirious dreams and the imagery of archaic ages. These illustrations fly free out of the literal narrative, revealing new dimensions and seeding worlds of precious beauty.

(...) Em suas aventuras, Alice mergulhou nas visões perturbadoras e surpreendentes de Dušan Kállay. Jardins das delícias, nau dos insensatos, extração da pedra da loucura, labirintos de sonhos. Texturas arcaicas, tonalidades de têmpera, rachaduras, craquelês, rabiscos, odores de terra úmida e de pele fedorenta de bichos obscuros e subterrâneos. Não havia Alice como aquela, a menina transparecia uma simplicidade singela, uma fragilidade ambígua, um não estranhar nada absurdamente estranho. O mundo se transtornava ao seu redor, um mundo de caos onírico, de jogos insanos, de jardins carnívoros, de corpos extremos, híbridos, sobrepostos, intensamente juntos, floresta de bichos, cores de vísceras de muitas cores, menina pesadelo...."

(...) In her adventures Alice plunged into the disturbing and surprising pictures of Dušan Kállay. Gardens of delight, ship of fools, extracting the stone of madness, dreams of labyrinths. Archaic textures, shades of tempera, cracks, scribbles, smells of damp earth and smelly skin of obscure and underground animals. There wasn't any Alice like that, the girl reveals an ambiguous fragility, an absurd and strange way of not entrench what happens around her. Wonderland delirious, a world of dreamlike chaos, insane games, carnivorous gardens, convulsive and hybrid bodies, forest of animals, colors of visceras of many colors, nightmarish girl.

About Dušan Kállay

"Dušan Kállay, born in Bratislava (Slovakia), graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Bratislava, where he teaches nowadays. When he was a student he met Kamila Štanclová and started to share with her a fundamental artistic and human sodality (they married in 1971). During their years together, these two artistic worlds influenced and stimulated each other till they totally merged as on the occasion of the huge piece (about one thousand illustrations) made for the volumes of “Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy tales”, an impressive work published in 2005 and 2006 by the major European publishers. Dušan Kállay brought back to life children’s classics among which Oscar Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta”, published in Italy by Bohem Press. Internationally renowned as one of the leading masters of illustration, he was awarded many prizes such as Hans Christian Andersen medal and the Gran Prix at Biennial of Illustration in Bratislava."

 

 

Looking Glass