Fat Rabbit IV

The Fat Rabbit Series

€165.00


Watercolor on Canson Cotton Paper.
23 W  x 30.5 H cm.
2025
Signed Front B/R.
Unframed.

Unique Piece 1/1.
Cetificate of authenticity printed.
Blockchain QR certified by Certs 365

This watercolor belongs to The Fat Rabbit series and is not a portrait of an animal. It is the come-and-go of a creature that has taken up residence in a garden pressed against the M-30, Madrid’s ring of traffic, where wildlife and the city’s own trap occupy the same ground. A fat rabbit in such a place is already a joke and already a fact. It feeds, it loops, it disappears into the same circuits that men have built for themselves. The painting treats that looping as style: ludic, even funny, and not innocent.

The sheet is a tangle. Dark grey and brown-black lines swell, knot and slide over one another like paths that have forgotten their destination—or like the rabbit’s own run, repeated until it becomes a scribble of survival. A strong blue band cuts through the confusion, a watercourse or a lane, something still trying to go somewhere. Paler washes sit underneath, a climate of garden and exhaust. Nothing is still. The swirls do not decorate the subject; they are the subject. Comes and goes. The warren and the slip-road. The animal that knows every hole, and the driver who knows every jam.

Fuente del Berro and the gardens along the M-30 are among the last green intervals the highway has not quite erased. Ducks, birds, a rabbit too well fed on what the city drops: life that insists on remaining where the noise is absurd. The fat rabbit is comic because it is plump in a landscape of haste. It is serious because it is trapped in a system it did not design, and still it goes on making its rounds. The work lets that double tone stand. A loop that closes on itself is funny; a loop that cannot find an exit is the same mark. Man, the painting suggests without a speech, has arranged a society of circuits—ring roads, timetables, enclosures—and then lives inside them with the same stubborn appetite.

The manner is playful on purpose. These are not tragic blacks. The lines have the slack of doodle and the weight of ink that has been allowed to run. They overlap until space becomes a game of who passed last. A figure-eight is a rabbit’s turn and a useless interchange. A hanging oval is a belly, a pond, a roundabout. The blue is the only colour that still behaves like a destination, and even it is crossed, stained, interrupted. Ludic here means that the trap is drawn with a certain pleasure. The hand enjoys the swirl. The city, too, enjoys its own congestion, in a way, or at least cannot stop producing it.

Light is still the paper. In the gaps between the knots the tooth of the sheet remains, a pale reserve that is almost air—the brief clearing in which the rabbit pauses, or the second between two cars. Pure pigment meets that surface without correction. The dark lines are wetter, more calligraphic; they pool at the turns and granulate where the brush has thinned. The blue wash sinks into the grain and keeps a different temperature, water or asphalt sheen. Texture is the difference between a garden and a diagram. You see the weave through the tangle. Accident—the bleed, the uneven thickness, the stain where two greys have married—is the wildlife in the work: what will not stay in lane.

The fat rabbit is not a mascot. It is a measure. A body that has found enough to eat in the middle of the madness, and a movement that has no pastoral left, only circuits. The M-30 does not appear as trucks or crash barriers. It appears as the impossibility of a straight line. Society does not appear as a crowd. It appears as the habit of returning on oneself. The joke is that the animal and the commuter share a choreography. The reflection is that the choreography was built to serve us and now we serve it.

What the watercolor offers is that choreography stated in matter: swirls of pigment, a blue that still wants to run, paper that still holds a little light. No foliage, no highway sign, no moral caption. Only the come-and-go of a fat rabbit in a garden beside the ring, and the funny, serious likeness of a life caught in its own design.