The Amazon does not ask to be explained. It reveals itself slowly, in patterns and silences, in rituals passed through generations. For Peruvian artist Harry Chávez, the Amazon was never just a landscape; it was a memory waiting to be reawakened.
His connection to the Andean-Amazonian cosmovision emerged from a deeply visceral encounter with beauty. “It was the art,” he says, “pre-Hispanic and contemporary indigenous art. Their beauty, sophistication, and mystery captivated me.” Yet it was more than admiration. The turning point came with his immersion in Peru’s shamanic traditions, a world of ritual, plants, and presence. In the ceremonies, something ancestral stirred. Something returned.
“Art is a bridge toward other dimensions,” Harry explains. “It gives shape to knowledge, emotions, and visions that live in the invisible world. It evokes, convokes, transforms reality. It gives voice to the spirit and stimulates epiphanies.”
Harry’s work is crafted for remembrance. In each of his pieces, animals appear not as illustrations, but as forces. Serpent. Feline. Bird. They do not symbolize. They arrive. “I must have a magical connection with them,” he says. “They are energies that have shared their power, beauty, and mystery with me.”
The stories behind these beings are infinite. The serpent and the feline, for example, are not motifs, they are ancestors. Present throughout Peru’s artistic history, they are totems. Their presence calls forth the deeper layers of our human psyche.
Harry speaks often of myth—not as fantasy, but as the most efficient language of the human spirit. “Creating a living and contemporary mythology is about giving shape, through allegory and symbol, to the deepest vital impulses of human beings and the natural forces that govern our lives.”
This, he believes, is the true crisis of our time: not ecological, not political, but symbolic. “Ideologies and religions have lost credibility. We are wandering, without sense. My role as an artist is to nurture a new mythic system that restores our faith in life, our sacred connection with nature, the miracle of existence.”
This mythology is not imagined. It is made. Through technique. Through offering. Harry’s most emblematic method is the mosaic of beads, a process of immense patience, rooted in both his formal studies and ancestral traditions. It recalls the vibrant surfaces of the Wixarika in Mexico, the geometric kené of the Shipibo in Peru, and the dotted language of Aboriginal Australia. He also embraces collage, layering meaning like sediment.
But materials alone do not complete his work. Synchronicity is the true compass. “It validates the vision,” he says. “It confirms that what I am creating is not coming solely from ego, but from other forces in dialogue with me. It shows up through dreams, nature spirits, symbols that appear suddenly.”
This is the spirit he brought to his collaboration with Delfin Amazon Cruises.
Invited by co-founder Lissy Urteaga, Harry created a new body of work for the reimagined Delfin I, focused on the most iconic beings of the rainforest: the pink river dolphin, the morpho butterfly, the sloth, the anaconda. “They are magical creatures,” he says. “Recreating them was very special. I believe we captured their beauty.”
For Harry, the alignment with Delfin was intuitive. “Their philosophy—’Woven by Nature, Crafted for You’—is the same philosophy that underlies my art. The works I created seek to awaken a moment of connection, of wonder, of recognition between these animals and the observer. I think we achieved that.”
Placed throughout the Delfin I, his pieces do more than decorate. They accompany. They watch. They whisper. Each one invites travelers to not just see the Amazon, but to feel it.
When asked what he hopes guests experience, his answer is simple: “That they feel wonder.”
But Harry’s vision extends beyond the suite walls. He sees art as a regenerative force. “It penetrates to the deepest parts of your being. That is where your spirit connects to the universe. And when that connection is activated, you honor nature as your most sacred temple. You care for it. You protect it. You conserve it.”
He dreams of an Amazonian art that is recognized globally, not as trend, but as truth. As a lineage. As a living myth still unfolding.
At Delfin Amazon Cruises, we believe the Amazon is not something to be consumed, but something to be in conversation with. Harry Chávez’s work embodies this. Through his eyes, the river does not simply flow.
It remembers. It dreams. It speaks. It calls us home.