New York’s Outsider Art Fair is always a place to find incredible, often obsessive, quirkily beautiful, haunting and original creations by artists who developed far from centers of the art world, and this year was no exception. At Stephen Romano’s booth, we came upon several bizarre (and perverse) etchings by Darcilio Lima, a self-taught Brazilian artist whose hybrid creatures depict a fantastical cosmology that processes the dark excesses of Romanesque through science fiction, mythology, and more. 

 Little is known of Lima. As Beate Echols recounts, the artist was born in 1944 in Cascavel, Ceara, and later moved to Rio, where he had some kind of breakdown and entered a facility for schizophrenics. There he developed his iconography of “erotic-fantastic realms” ruled by a lizard-like king. Celebrated for his visionary sensibility in Brazil, Lima traveled in Europe in the early 70s, but eventually disappeared from view and died, suffering from mental illness and nearly forgotten, in 1991. 

The engravings at the fair depict hybrid creatures engaged in curious, unknowable rituals that seem designed to at once seduce and repel the viewer. In one, thought to be dated around 1970, a figure that is part feline (?), part human female, part mermaid (?), whose groin is locked in armor, bears a cup also clutched by a gargoyle apparently transfixed by its contents. A cord extending from another part of its body appears to have hooked a penis. 

 

Like the other engraving on view, it isn’t easy to look at. But you might not be able to stop.