JUNGLE STORIES

 

The exhibition Cuentos de la selva [Jungle stories] shows the works that Antonio Santos produced to illustrate the homonymous book published by Nordic, recently awarded with the Best Published Book Prize in 2018 from the Ministry of Culture of Spain.

According to Horacio Quiroga’s original story, Antonio Santos builds a parallel jungle through his works. Each piece is a relief on paper created by overlapping cardboards painted with acrylic. A total of thirty three scenes depicting the varied ecosystem of the planet’s forests to introduce the visitor to a world of gloom in which he does not feel safe, as he is transported, for a few moments, to the wildest nature.

As a child, Antonio Santos (Huesca, 1955) often visited the Natural Sciences Museum of Madrid with his father. Fascinated by each scene, he felt through his childlike gaze how animals came to life and moved. Since then, he has an obsessive fixation for that way of representing and explaining reality. Santos is an illustrator, a writer, a sculptor and a painter. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and has held more than sixty solo exhibitions. For the last thirteen years he has focused on the illustration and has published fifty books. His work has been awarded the Daniel Gil Award for Best Children’s Book in 2003 and the second National Illustration Prize in 2004.