A vast array of analytical essays exists in the blogosphere that seeks to explain why we collect art. Like trying to understand why we fall in love, the gamut of explanations is at once highly diverse yet difficult to nail down. The need for decorative embellishment, the expected investment value, the putting on of sophisticated airs, the desire for direct participation in culture… These certainly affect acquisition decisions and add fuel to the art market fire but they do not explain the emotional, cerebral pleasure collectors receive from their art trophies. Ask anyone who truly values the pieces they have acquired and they will describe a deep love and connection with these objects quite unlike any relationship with other inanimate things they own. What is the source of this bond?

A decade or so ago, I gradually came to the realization that, much to my disappointment and stunned shock, I was not the artistic talent I had previously believed myself to be. Though I had the temperament, passion and desire, it turned out I had none of the vision, dedication, originality nor persistence prerequisite for a life as an artist. The realization shattered my heretofore self-identity -- one I had worn like a wetsuit since my earliest teen years -- and set me off on various tangents that eventually led to my current satisfactory, pleasant and lucrative life, happy yet lacking the gushing creative outlet I had once dreamed possible and naively believed to be inevitable.

Opening next Thursday evening, Toronto-based artist Nicholas Di Genova's first solo exhibition in Paris, titled Preemptive Evolution, will be held at Dukan Hourdequin Gallery.

Nicholas Di Genova has developed a unique practice that is as firmly rooted in the utterly fantastical as it is in the deeply scientific. His depictions of hybrid creatures examine wildlife illustration through a Sci-fi lens. Di Genova’s highly detailed, and often encyclopaedic investigations of the natural world, yield monstrosities that are the most unlikely of amalgamations – these can be, for instance, a fusion of cat, goat and snake with cormorant, or tortoise merging into carnivorous plant and even a toad with eight, tentacle-like tongues. His depictions are obviously imagined; but Di Genova’s illustrative precision, makes these Audubon caricatures almost plausible.

For the past year, Toronto artist Nicholas Di Genova has been slaving away in his studio preparing works for an upcoming solo exhibition at a Parisian gallery called Dukan et Hourdequin. When we say slaving, we really mean it. This artist works so hard that major hedge funds are wagering he is going to go blind by the age of 40 resulting in skyrocketing prices of his finely rendered drawings. Now that he is in the final stretch before his show in Paris, Di Genova has gone to the mattresses, holed up in his west-end studio for the final 90 day push.

Over the past couple of years, Di Genova's works have gone macro and micro simultaneously. They've grown in size in that the sheets he is working on border on epic yet the imagery he is busting onto those sheets have shrunk to allow for each work to offer thousands and thousands of individually rendered animals hatched from the artist's vivid imagination and fine pointed ink pens.