Your guise is a malicious trick

Oleksiy Kustovsky, The Tempter Putin, November 25, 2015.

Sheer opulence of line work across a century. Oleksiy Kustovsky and Valdemar Andersen are visibly creating the very act of seeing before us; we see the intricacy created, the detail within each detail, the sectioning to let every scale catch the light in its very own way and the minuscule open or dotted closed rectangles. All of it at once before us for us to be willingly bedazzled. 

Willingly since we very well know this is the way of boa constrictors; the very visibility is there to make us not see what is before us. An image of all-out artistry thus turns out to be political to the core. The constrictor below was once an occupant of the Copenhagen Zoo; the imprisoned one too awaiting the right moment.

Valdemar Andersen, "Kvælerslangen", from Zoologisk Have by Kai Holberg, 1907.

The first cartoon above is courtesy of Oleksiy Kustovsky and must not be reproduced without his permission.

The title above this blog post refers to a line in the poem on the boa constrictor by Kai Holberg in the collection of poems "Zoologisk Have" to which Valdemar Andersen created the visual side. The translation is mine.