Nahual Dog

“The nahual or animal alterego represents the strongest bond between man and nature surrounding him; a kind of insurance against the human forces not capable of giving satisfaction to the constraints of the natural world where he lives and acts, over which the cultivated man has risen but is still attached to…”

“… It is a disjunction from the ‘Me’ that we are (or think we are) towards the other that we also are, and who is always different from us. Disjunction: apparition; experience of the oddity of being human.”

Octavio Paz

Some times, the augurs of ancient Rome predicted the disasters while painting, and precisely there, among the symbols, people knew how to distinguish the signs of barbarousness, war, decandence and corruption.
(In Mexico, the nahual, human-animal that feeds himself with the reflection of the soul, is a primitive augur that knows what will occur because he lives incorporating dreams and predictions…just like dogs still do).
What I see in this series of terrible and xx images corresponds to a certain kind of magical metempsychosis, where the photographer’s gaze is already an apocalyptical reminder. Through the way he approaches this xx beloved animals called dogs (the same ones that are characters of Victor Hugo, Chejov, Jack London, Gorky, Nabokov and many others) he is capable of effectively creating “altars of horror”, with all the pathos and sublimation possible only artists with such a powerful sensitivity.

Hugo Argüelles