In the 1950s, after permanently settling in Mexico, Leonora Carrington dreamt up a series of bizarre children’s stories that she initially painted on the bedroom walls of her sons Gabriel and Pablo, later gathering them into a private notebook. The original version of this collection was a series of pages on which, by hand and in broken Spanish, the artist transcribed nine of the short bedtime stories she told her children, illustrating them with bright, outlandish watercolours. Leche del sueño (The Milk of Dreams) – as Gabriel Weisz, the artist’s son, dubbed the collection of fairy tales – conceals a universe of disturbing images that, by using a bizarre verbal-visual language, narrates the story of mutant creatures that fill her fanciful universes including children who lose their heads, vultures trapped in gelatin, and carnivorous machines. Under their childish veneer, Carrington’s stories are scraps of dreams that are like a mother’s milk, essential to a child’s growth and development. As it is in the whole Carrington’s work, the tales of Leche del sueño show a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something or someone else.
Stefano Mudu
