Something still resists today’s creative decline, that stainless technicism that the eye drinks in and reworks with every passing glance; something remains that can still go beyond the limits of the most unspoiled emotionality, inviting us, from the standpoint of perceptual psychology, to keep alive the clear, childlike vision with which we observe the world. Among the vast selection of doses with which every kind of pain is sold to us, an unusual visual narrative makes its way, one whose discarded approach holds the power to move and heal. The illustrations of Benito Fiola (@benito.illustrator), in their ecstatic naturalness, manage to restore a sense of childlike wonder to the observer’s eyes. Illustrations of an undergrowth of melancholic, dreamlike, timeless creatures that, with every brushstroke, embody a sentimentally universal lexicon. Fragility, dreams, the helpless need to exist in all one’s shining smallness make Benito’s watercolour illustrations a symbol that goes beyond the figure; his creations appear as a warning to recalibrate the sense of the measured and the radiant that is capable of existing in every expression of being; far from the booming digital celebrations of an empty, inherited, unmotivated, and often falsified grandeur. Admiring his illustrations is therapy for the spirit, against the excess of negative stimuli; it is the dismantling of those behavioural codes based on haste, aggression, the omnipresent visual egocentrism from which we suffer and to which we increasingly want to align ourselves, cancelling out any hypothetical message, provided that message can renew itself, identical in its emptiness. Can illustrations heal? Yes. Neurodesign has the duty to teach the observer about the dangers the eye runs into when sifting through sets of lines and colours devoid of meaning. The dimension of restraint, of self-sufficiency, of resisting silently and patiently in the face of jolts, is the promise that Benito manages to keep; portraiture which, like illustrations made entirely by hand, returns authority to the exclusively human ability to place in what is created more than a response in volumes and tones, but rather a burning subset of stimuli to be protected for every observer, from universally human hand to humanely universal eye.