Niyaz Huseynzade 
Do you ever look at anything and see something else? That’s the kind of surrealism that Beto Val, an Ecuadorian artist, employs in his artwork. He mixes old paintings to produce amusing and silly creatures by alchemizing vintage images. The by-product is a strange mixture of fruits with fowls and aquatic life with land animals. Val removes and rearranges fins, wings, and scaly talons into otherworldly creatures using public-domain images: round owl faces peep out from pineapples, autumn leaves sprout from tropical birds, and a visualization that evokes a birth chart displays fish with bodies made of strawberries, brains, and an early, industrial train. His use of color and arrangement gives these pictures their distinctiveness.
Val’s shop offers prints and other merchandise, and his book, The Great Book of the Imaginary Animal Kingdom, can be found on Bookshop. You can follow Val’s creative process and view the strange hybrids he dreams up next by following him on Instagram.
