Snail introduces an ironic inversion of the “butterfly effect” metaphor. Transformation here is not instantaneous or dramatic, but slow, psychologically sedimented, and eventually not guaranteed to happen. Someone will find the snail the main character of this artwork. A well-known symbol of travel or transit, it signifies the problem of travel between the worlds, realms, and dimensions depicted here. We see that the shell itself represents different levels of tangibility. Free of the wider context that travel brings, it has a special, non-quotidian quality, with extra attention given, dedicated like meditation, or maybe just very thoughtful, informing an elevated consciousness or intentionality, performed as a daily offering or a once-per-life pilgrimage. The snail doesn’t belong to any of the worlds presented here. It is just present on the edge of illusion and reality. Its home is also a Möbius strip, heart, or eternity symbol. The snail is nowhere, locked out of its home, free of its existential races. Seemingly shopping the Universe for its next life, it is in a leisurely, slow choice of its next incarnation. Will it be the body rendered here?

Everything feels eccentric, too much, too accentuated, however without suffocating; it is rather suspense, complexity, symbols, and a feeling of sudden opulence, like mother-of-pearl saturated with liquid gold. The artwork is packed with multiple symbols of life as a path line. It conveys the spirit of alchemy and transformation, quantum physics, transit, lucid dreams, and out-of-body experience.

The snail is sliding down on the edge of its shell, almost tickling the man’s upper lip with its antennae, as a sensual element or merely as a wake-up call. Its home, better suited for an oyster with a taste for gold, looks nothing like a real shell for a snail. It is opened like a book, or like a finished hors d’oeuvre right on the man’s face, shaping a heart, but even more, turning into a whimsical trampoline for the snail and its next move. Conveying intimacy, suspense, interaction with time itself, softly cutting it into “before” and “after.”