Animal Sanctuary: Iguana
2024, Acrylic on canvas 36” x 23” $1100
To a house full of cats and other rescue critters, a passerby brought an iguana he’d found lost on the streets of New York. One of the cats judged this newcomer especially adorable, and now spends all her time in his aloof company. She respects the boundaries set by his occasional bad temper, and as soon as the signs are favourable, covers him with tireless kisses, hugs and licks. Her reward, just like Contino’s, is to have someone to kiss, lick, hold near and dear.
About the Animal Sanctuary theme:
It is not hard to notice that most cases of friendship among different, often inimical species, occur when animals sheltered in sanctuaries find themselves, on the one hand, freed from the commandment of looking for food; yet sad and lonely because of being separated from their congeners, on the other. Such conditions of isolation bring about a need for vital contact with a friendly body, breathing close to one’s own, that supersedes the drive to acquire nourishment. If we were to consider these friendships with Darwin or Marx, we could say that they are a form of culture, an art of being together that most animals possess. Such frienships have become better known since the progress of the bewildering feats of nature photography, and for us are made real when these fortunate beings’ individual survival is due to the kindness of animal lovers.
How moving to see people dedicate their homes, often modest, to the saving and sheltering of animals in distress. We are tempted to compare their mode of living with compassion with the all powerful, profit-driven conglomerates. Think agribusiness or scientific research, for whose success technology makes available means ever better adapted to produce numbers hard to imagine: animals whose destiny is to be enslaved, exhausted, tortured and killed. Is it even possible to compare such unrestricted explosion of wealth with the scarcity of means available to those who defend the non-human animal well-being?