The Bolognese artist Enrico Fuser is a modern master of aquatic art. Working under the pseudonym El Fooser, he has produced an oeuvre devoted to the ocean, remarkable for its quality and stylistic variety. There are faithful renderings of the deep sea’s bizarre piscine fauna, alongside whimsical chimeras combining fowl and sea, alongside surrealistic cetaceans adorned with cacti and candles and colorful saddles.
Some artwork has focused on anemonefishes, depicting a number of manmade strains that should be familiar to aquarists: the Gold Nugget Maroon, the Lightning Maroon, the Black Storm Ocellaris, the Black Snowflake Ocellaris, along with classics like the wild-type A. ocellaris and A. polymnus. Rather than using a traditional paper for his watercolors, El Fooser has painted onto blank pages sourced from an unnamed book printed in the 1920’s. This beautifully aged tome provides an attractive yellowed patina to the works, while a ghostly trace of the original text is still readily discernible, adding some visual interest to the otherwise sparse composition.
