“Animals are different, bloody and bloodless, two-legged, four-legged and legless, swimming, running and flying,” writes Michał Komar, beginning the story about unusual creatures that have inhabited our world for a long time. On the pages of the book we find the Psychopher, about whom you need to learn as much as possible if you want to “understand who man is and what his place is in the plan of Providence”, the Bishop's Fish and the Monk Fish, the Unicorn, the Lion, the Viper, the Sea Centipede or the Ant. All these animals, seemingly so different from each other, have one thing in common: dignity. “Each animal has respect for itself and the place it occupies in the order of nature,” the author writes, arguing that it is false to say that many more animals once lived than today. “Animals, seeing the ineptitude with which man imitates them and experiencing the enormity of embarrassment, decided to hide in human oblivion,” he explains. “Bestiary” fortunately reminds us of them, and the unusual drawings of Paweł Kowalewski allow us to hope that this time we will not forget them again. Every illustration by Paweł Kowalewski is different. Collected together in the “Bestiary”, however, they constitute a whole. Entering the artist's personal world, we will see that the problems that occupy him are eternal, and the language he speaks to us is painfully simple and defenselessly pure — to quote the art critic Anda Rottenberg. Even during his studies at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Paweł Kowalewski kept expressive notebooks in which he recorded his state of mind. Kowalewski was interested in spontaneous expression of thoughts, forgetting about plastic education, as he says, “freeing the hand” in order to simply be in a natural creative process. It is precisely this spontaneous quality that is contained in the illustrations in the “Bestiary”, and the reader will find in them quite a lot of the cassandric nature of the creator. One of the last drawings, in the epilogue of the book, is by a Polish sculptor and close friend of Kowalewski — Krzysztof M. Bednarski. The “sweaty monument” simply “would not have been sculpted” better by anyone else! The book will be available from September 15 in Empik stores and online sales. “The Bestiary” will be released by Luna House.