RHINO HEAD - EPISODE 1
SEMPER IN EXTREMIS
This illustrated fantastical narrative consists of 21 chapters and features short, self-contained stories told from shifting narrative and temporal perspectives. It is a collaboration between author/director Carlos Atanes and illustrator Jan van Rijn, and explores the realms of eroticism and magical realism.
What lies behind a simple fable about wolves and rabbits? An actress fleeing in terror from an underground film shoot on the slopes of Mount Fuji? A New Mexico scrap dealer serving coffee to two visitors from outer space? A fashion designer who believes she is being dreamed by a mythical figure? An antiques forger who discovers an old tale has come true? A female cult disrupting the cosmic order with terrifying rituals?
This interwoven web of stories includes a summons to a fictitious event, sunflowers acting as orgasmic energy batteries, rhino heads at the farthest reaches of the world, pornographic films projected inside the viewer’s mind, dolls transformed into women and women transformed into dolls – a constellation of strange intertwined incidents creating a hyperfable, moving beyond its individual characters because the meaning of the whole can only be revealed to each individual reader.
Forword by John Coulthart:
There's a persistent myth that rhinoceros horn is used as an aphrodisiac treatment in traditional Chinese medicine. Something about the phallic shape no doubt helps sustain the misconception, together with the fact that powdered rhino horn really is used by doctors in some Asian countries, albeit not for the reasons that Westerners expect. If the horns of butchered animals were being used to stimulate the flagging libidos of Chinese men, I'd suggest the afflicted males looked instead at this collection of words and pictures by Carlos Atanes and Jan van Rijn. Better to bend the spine of a book for lascivious purposes than further deplete the world's store of endangered creatures.
This isn't to say that Rhino Head has been written as any kind of stimulant—I haven't questioned the creators about their intentions—but we're always led to this supposition whenever Eros is a predominant factor in a work of art, even more so when the women like those in Jan's drawings are so free with their mouths and their fingers. This, however, is only one of the perspectives yielded by a collection of narratives whose points of view are in a continual state of flux. Identities here are as mutable as those in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the human and the animal—even, in this telling, the extraterrestrial—aren't separated realms but stations on a spectrum of being. "Fables" is the term the creators of Rhino Head use to describe their explorations, which gives us another perspective, one that lifts the material away from the humid sphere of the erotic into regions of more thoughtful contemplation. The fabulous nature of the fable is the primary concern, detached from the moral lessons that often underline such tales.
Then there's the structure of the book itself, which offers a non-linear reading if we require it. Each of these twenty-one episodes is self-contained, yet any one piece may contain the seeds of incidents explored at greater length before or after. This removes us from the simpler fare the aphrodisiac seekers prefer, an audience who might find their desires frustrated by the narrative complexity and textual wit of Carlos's writing. Twenty-one episodes is one too few for the pieces to be easily mapped across the Major Arcana of the Tarot, but there is something Tarot-like about these fables. Jan's drawings often have a hieratic quality that reminds me of Tarot icons, while the Tarot itself is a collection of symbols, situations and archetypes whose selection by the querent builds with each reading into a unique narrative. The final perspective in Rhino Head is the reader's own: read the cards, shuffle the deck, and start again.