Illustration: Love is in the Air / Book Cover / Jani Virk

This illustration, titled as Love is in the Air (2009), directly responds to the title of the book Ljubezen v zraku written by the Slovene author Jani Virk. The author addresses the complexity of human behaviour in a constant search for true love. The main protagonist is a divorced middle-aged man: a single parent, a music teacher, a fan of the music band Santana and of the writer the Márquis de Sade, a prisoner of his own personal ‘disorders’ and dualities. On the other hand, his daughter Ula is to him the only light in his life. His attempts in searching for the fulfilment of love are shown to us as countless incidents of his staggering from one relationship to the other. At the end of the story, we even find him in Mexico, in Tequila (as seen in the stitched agave plant at the back), but all these attempts appear to be in vain, uncertain and elusive.

The illustration is, therefore, playing on the traditional air-borne fertility symbols of “birds and bees”. The methods of traditional crafts, such as stitching and patchwork, digitally photomontaged, are thus used as subversive techniques to address the taboo issues in the theme of sexual reproduction.

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