Protean I, 2026

Protean I appears like a snail-cat escaped from the margins of a medieval manuscript, carrying its spiral shell as both home and heraldic emblem. It embodies the curious logic of bestiary creatures, where domestic familiarity and impossible anatomy coexist without contradiction.

The Protean Bestiary is a cycle of twelve miniature paintings inspired by alchemical imagery, medieval bestiaries, and the dream-logic of myth. Each creature appears as a shape-shifting mystery: part animal, part spirit, part symbolic apparition. The series takes its name from Proteus, the ancient archetype of transformation, and treats these beings as mutable intelligences rather than fixed species. Some resemble forgotten heraldic emblems, others wandering tricksters, prophetic familiars, or guardians of obscure rites. Their meanings remain deliberately unresolved, inviting the viewer to encounter them not as illustrations of a known mythology, but as fragments of a mythology still in the process of becoming.