"Alice and the Seven Keys - a Pharmacopeia of Creativity" written & illustrated by Adriana Peliano

 Comments by Semper Lux*

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 "Alice and the Seven Keys - a Pharmacopeia of Creativity"

published ‎in 2021 by @amascoteeditora (Portuguese) @underlinepublishing (English)

During the start of the pandemic in 2020, Peliano used Carroll's characters to come up with an idea to improve our humdrum lives: through seven "keys", we can use Alice "potions" to transform any situation.

"In Alice and the Seven Keys, Adriana Peliano accompanies you on a journey, exploring your creativity by means of games, magical elixirs, & her resplendent collages. Lovers of Alice, fantasy, fairy tales, and dreams will be enchanted." 

Mark Burstein, President Emeritus The Lewis Carroll Society of North America 

She lists these 7 potions using her signature metamorphic collages:

1: Cover: Alice moves 7 times. The number is significant: 

7 is the only prime number preceding a cube.

7 is the Aliquot sum of 8, & is the base of the 7-Aliquot tree.

7 is the only dimension, besides 3, in which a vector cross product can be defined.

7 is the lowest dimension of a known exotic sphere

 

2: Alice wears her Max Ernst thinking cap, like the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, & decides her fate by choosing which door to open

 

3: Metamorphic elixir 1: "Alicescopic Curiouserism". Ingredients: Petals of Alicedelic Perplexity. Flame of burning curiosity. Attraction to the unknown. Make-believe yeast. High dose of initiative. Invitation from the universe

4: "Logiclock Time": Petals of Alicedelic Tac Tic. Antidote of pointless pointer. Spirals of peace & love with time. Lushness of now. Synchronicity activator. Serendipity liquor

5: "Alicinatic Travel Formula": Petals of Magicomic Delusions. Soluble memories of a storyteller. Water from the river where Alice was born. Labyrinthine Footsteps. Mary Poppins wind. Lucid dreams

6: "Alicedelic Metamorflower": Petals of Alicedelic Chrysalices. Butterfly Breath Medicinalis. Smoke from transflowermations. Alchemical cocoons. Much room

 

 

 

7: "Flowersophical Madness": Petals of Alicinatory Folly. Extract of stone of madness. Flowersophical paradoxes. Tea of thinking differently. Vision of the invisible. Magic from a Mad Hat

8: "Mathematical Games": Petals of Alicinaris ludens. Tincture of white & red roses. Wrap of porte-manteaux. Sine qua nonsense extract. Vitaminutes of Impossible geometries. Paradoxical paregoric

 

9: At the end, do you arrive at the peaceful Giverny garden of Claude Monet?

 

10: Or at the false paradise of earthly pleasures of Hieronymus Bosch?  Swim in the bath of Venus, but look, the fountain is cracked, this garden of Lust & Vice is ephemeral, & will not satisfy you for long

 

 

 

"This is the panel from which the title Garden of Earthly Delights was derived. Here Bosch’s humans, the offspring of Adam and Eve, gambol freely in a surrealistic paradisiacal garden, appearing as mad manifestations of a whimsical creator—sensate cogs of nature alive in a larger, animate machine. It is a matter of divided opinion as to what, exactly, the humans are actually doing in this delightful, dense and nonsensical landscape, alive with a dizzying array of some of Bosch’s most delectable creatures and dotted with his alembic architecture. It is almost as though he imagined the world of creation as a terrific Willy Wonka series of machines with humans as their product." Dr. Sally Hickson

Adriana Peliano: "What could happen to the inhabitants of Wonderland after that strange collective nightmare. The scare over, they would open the door to a new world and a transformed life. Alice would learn to remain calm in the face of challenges and conflicts. The Rabbit relaxed inside his hole without a clock and would no longer be late. He was going to have tea with the Hatter, the Impossible, and Time itself. Then the Queen of Hearts would emerge. She would finally lose her mind and embrace the Heart. The butterfly would come out of the cocoon and go on a journey of self-knowledge. The Cat would invite the new to happen, traveling in imagination with a wide, lunatic smile." 

 

 

STORIES 

 

 

 

 

Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, who created its own Alicedelic Alixir and to curiosity, madness, journey, dream, game, transformation, added to our time the 8th key: Fun!

 

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"Lewis Carroll In The Victorian Era: Other Alice Stories" by Katia Canton and Adriana Peliano

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"Lewis Carroll In The Victorian Era: Other Alice Stories" illustrated by Adriana Peliano @adriana_peliano written by Katia Canton @katia_canton_arteseescritos published by DCL in 2010

This lovely little book is part of the "Art Tells Stories Collection". It examines the artistic creation of Alice by looking at the creative influences in the Victorian times.

 

 

1: Cover: Tea Party with Adriana Peliano's signature visual amuse-bouches

2: Cheshire Cat in Salvador Dalí's "Persistence of Memory" painting 

 

3: The Victorian Era shown through various pictures of Queen Victoria, juxtaposed with the Queen of Hearts who resembles her very much

 

4: Caterpillar is in Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". At the bottom the audience applauds the first performance of Amilcare Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda" at the Teatro Amazonas on January 7, 1897. This opera house is in Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. It was featured in Werner Herzog's brilliant "Fitzcarraldo" film, & in the wonderful novels by Eva Ibbotson: "Journey to the River Sea" & "A Company of Swans"

5: Humpty Dumpty sits on Bosch's Fountain of Life. White Rabbit hides in the hole at the bottom, instead of the usual owl (owls in paradise are reminders that the devil's temptations are hiding everywhere). On the left an adult Alice writes "sic transit gloria Mundi" (Thus passes the glory of the world) a traditional phrase used in the ritual of papal coronation, first used for the Antipope Alexander V

6: With his multiple Boschian legs, Humpty is Saint Vitus, the Christian martyr persecuted by the Romans. His feast was celebrated with dancing before his statue. This dancing became popular & "Saint Vitus Dance" is the neurological disorder Sydenham's chorea, characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements. Vitus is the patron saint of dancers, he also protects against lightning strikes, animal attacks & oversleeping.

Here he holds the famous "9 Objekte" of the German artist Gerhard Richter

7: At the Tea Party, the hourglass of Father Time blasts off into space like a rocket, "to boldly go where no man has gone before". The metrome is the famous 1923 "Indestructible Object/ Object to Be Destroyed" by the American artist Man Ray. It has a photograph of his lover's eye attached:

 

"Cut out the eye from the photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome & regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow."

 

 

 

 

8: Tweedledum & Tweedledee are Lewis Carroll as White Knight. Alice climbs on Giuseppe Arcimboldo's famous "Librarian" painting, a triumph of 16th century abstract art, & a parody of "materialistic book collectors more interested in acquiring books than in reading them." (Hint, hint, Instagrammers)

 

 

 

 

9: "Rosy Dreams & Slumbers Light" - a photograph of sleeping Alexandra "Xie" Rhoda Kitchin, notable 'child-friend' & favourite photographic subject of Lewis Carroll

 

 

 

10: A fantastic mishmash of elements from Bosch & Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Notice the rabbit cutting a slice of the roasted piglet

 

STORIES

 

 

 

 

Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, who travels inside illustrations and brings us fun, curiouserism and dispair for buying books.

Follow on instagram: @semperluxus

Geometric Looking Glass illustrated by Adriana Peliano published by Zahar in 2015

 Comments by Semper Lux*

 

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This is my *second* post about this metamorphic Brazilian version that transforms Tenniel's illustrations into something entirely new.

This book is a true kaleidoscope, Peliano rearranges the images into ever-changing patterns which lead to new interpretations of the story:

"For each of the two Alice books I developed a different logical strategy: for Looking Glass, I created a game of puzzles that are dismantled & recreated all the time, interacting with Tenniel's original images"

1: Back cover: While Alice looks through the mini-Alice telescope which we saw in Wonderland, the reader is looking inside a large kaleidoscope with rotating images of Red Queen

 

 

2: Alice goes through the prismatic mirror, exchanging the geometry of her world for a completely different one

 

 

3: The jagged prisms of the flowers show their irritation with Alice, an echo of Andersen's Snow Queen, where jagged pieces of a broken mirror brought discord to the world

 

 

4: Inside the kaleidoscope Red Queen leads Alice in an endless race of repeating patterns

 

 

5: Reality & perception shift again when Alice exits the forest with the fawn, who will now perceive Alice as something dangerous

 

 

6: Alice discreetly holds her nose as the wave of odour emanates from the ham sandwich that was kept for too long in Haigha's unrefrigerated bag

 

 

 

7: A geometrical math problem - how to cut the π into 3:14 pieces

 

 

8: Different facets of meaning made visible: everything that White Knight says goes into Alice's one ear, & comes out of the other, quite changed, just like in the Broken Telephone game 

 

 

 

9: A mandala of memories hovers about Alice's head like a halo, a mirror image of Red King's dream earlier in the story

 

 

10: The psychedelic multiplicities of the different facets of Peliano's Looking Glass multiverse

 

 

 

montage: @Semperlux

11: Alice goes through the Golden Arches to meet Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Their uniforms reflect McDonald's colours, their bellies reflect their fondness for Big Macs

12: Walrus & Carpenter are on a huge checkered picnic tablecloth that foreshadows the doom of the poor Oysters

 

 

13: Sheep's shop :

The Egyptian sun-disc of Aten, depicted as the solar disk emitting rays over its worshippers.

The pharaoh Akhenaton had a Hymn to the Sun: "It has been called 'one of the most significant and splendid pieces of poetry to survive from the pre-Homeric world.'"

Other elements in the picture: An upside down pyramid & a kite for reaching the sun 

 

14: Waves of sound burst from the drums, deafening poor Alice like Quasimodo in his noisy belltower in Notre Dame 

 

 

15: The Final Banquet: The ray of light is like the light that hit St Paul on the Road to Damascus, an epiphany that changed the status quo of his world.

 

 

And the prismatic mirror cracks, and reality changes once more, like in Tennyson's poem:

"Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack'd from side to side;

'The curse is come upon me,' cried

       The Lady of Shalott."

Kaleidoscope = "observation of beautiful forms." Just like this book.

 

 

STORIES

 

 

ADRIANA PELIANO, artist and designer, has been working with collage for over twenty years: "I'm a collagist - I mix, displace, & play with Art."

Initially using scissors, glue and various magazines, she also started to incorporate digital art. With curious objects she created assemblages and metamorphoses. 

She did two Masters in Visual Arts, one in England, at the Kent Institute of Art (2002), and another at the University of São Paulo (2012), this one with the dissertation Through Surrealism and What Alice Found There. 

A member of the Lewis Carroll societies of England, the United States and Japan, in 2009 she founded the Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil, of which she is president. 

In 2012 she received the Jabuti award for the graphic design of Alice's Adventures Underground, which she translated together with Myriam Ávila.

Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, who solve some puzzles, and creates many others.

Follow on instagram: @semperluxus

 

 

 

Metamorphic Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Adriana Peliano published by Zahar in 2015

 comments by Semper Lux*

source on instagram @semperluxus

In this artistic alchemy Peliano takes Tenniel's original illustrations & transforms them into a marvelous game using surrealistic collages to emphasize the enigmas of Carroll's text:

 

"Her collages & metamorphic assemblages are magical & multiple inventories, where logic is reinvented with new meanings & narratives, creating language games & dream labyrinths. Everything is transformed to tell new stories that dislocate our way of seeing"

 

1: Cover: Alice in her yellow "Nursery Alice" dress tells the cards "vade retro, Satana". Hatter spins out of control bottom left

 

 

2: Rabbit disappears into the dream spiral rabbit hole. The big upside-down eyes belong to the opera singer Lina Cavalieri, "Venus on Earth", renowned as the world's most beautiful woman. Her classic beauty served as a perfect canvas & was made iconic by the Italian artist Piero Fornasetti

 

 

3: Alice sees the enchanted Garden, which is the famous Flammarion engraving, a metaphorical illustration of the Quest for Knowledge

 

 

4: The transformation of Alice through drink recalls the story of the Hindu god Krishna whose skin turned blue when he drank the poisoned milk of the demoness Putana

 

 

 

5: Alice stretches like a Tower of Pisa cosmic telescope. Behind her are the “Cheshire Cat” group of galaxies, named because of their smiling cat-like appearance

 

 

6: René Magritte's "Shéhérazade", whose pearl-tears fill the Pool of Tears

 

 

7: Alice growing inside Rabbit's house puts her in an impossible situation, perfectly illustrated by the impossible Penrose triangle of the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, celebrated for images which cannot exist as solid objects

 

8: Caterpillar's head is a reversible face by Rex Whistler, based on Japanese 上下絵 Joge-e images.

The two waterpipes are from Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights"

 

9: Tea Party is doubly topsy turvy, with Salvador Dalí's melted clocks from "Persistence of Memory"

 

 

10: Inside a huge all-seeing eye is Dalí's Lobster Telephone: "I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone"

 

 

 

STORIES:

 

* Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, travel guide to whimsical worlds.

Follow on instagram: @semperluxus