Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turns the tabletop into a world whose objects no longer agree about their size or function. At the left, a face rises from a patterned vessel beneath an enormous eye-like form; at the centre, an elongated spoon competes with a pointed doorway and tower. The painting’s subject is the instability of recognition: things remain identifiable just long enough for their identities to become uncertain.
The broad horizontal format distributes attention between this imposing head, the central verticals and the fantastical flowers at the right. A blue, mountain-like horizon binds the scene, dividing the pale ochre upper field from the red-brown foreground. Tilted rectangular planes offer the promise of a table, then extend into something closer to terrain. Light is not governed by one convincing source: white accents articulate individual forms, while warm colour gives the whole setting its atmosphere. Visible ridges and directional marks interrupt the yellow field, and narrow dark lines secure shapes across more worked passages. The documented combination of oil, oil stick and gesso is consistent with this dialogue between painted mass and drawing, although a photograph cannot assign each mark to a particular material.
The Saatchi catalogue dates the work to 2025 and identifies Carroll’s story as its point of departure, explicitly favouring dream logic over direct illustration. That intention is documented; a personal association between the face and the artist’s biography is not. Suspended circles, wiry lines and ambiguous organic forms invite comparison with Miró’s surrealist vocabulary, while the conversion of still-life objects into an inhabited landscape extends Surrealism’s disruption of ordinary relations. These are formal affinities, not established influences. Unlike the comparatively sparse field of Miró’s The Birth of the World, Dulcídio accumulates descriptive and ornamental incidents, making density rather than emptiness the vehicle of disorientation.
The painting enters the contemporary afterlife of literary Surrealism without claiming an unprecedented iconography. Its limitation is the familiarity of the dream-world vocabulary: proliferating symbols can become decorative abundance when every object asks for equal attention. Yet the unequal scales and unstable tabletop give the invention a more consequential structure than a collection of whimsical motifs. The face offers an emotional anchor, while the horizon repeatedly promises a space that the foreground refuses to obey. The work is most persuasive where this conflict makes Wonderland an experience of looking rather than a story already known.