Fievres Nocturnes (Night Fevers) by Toshio Saeki
"An artist with a real cult following, Toshio Saeki is the inventor of a unique style, in a field that he has completely transformed, ero guro — which can be translated as 'erotic-grotesque scenes'. This genre, whose paternity is attributed to the writer Edogawa Ranpo, finds its source in the origins of classic Japanese drawing, nourishing monsters and nightmarish scenes in many prints throughout time. Saeki, by declining traditional motifs and mixing them with his own obsessions, echoed the anxieties of his generation, the youth of the 1970s, who believed they could free themselves from the conventions of a paternalistic society before experiencing disillusionment.
Human society, its violence and its defects are the support for scenes whose cruelty provokes fear or laughter, pushing the mechanics of fantasy to its limits. Sadomasochism here does not cover any reality, drawing from oneirism a form of macabre poetry. Stimulated by the censorship that is rife in Japan - it is forbidden to show the sexes - Saeki makes the forbidden an artistic constraint and deports the oldest subject in the world towards the absurd and the oneirism. His precise style, which reminds Europeans of the famous 'clear line' of Hergé and Joost Swarte, remains strange for the Japanese reader as well as for the Western reader, each finding in this perfectly simple line a form of new exoticism. This perception can only be explained by the absolute originality of an extravagant imagery, straight from the pen of an artist who has devoted his life to tracing as closely as possible 'what happens in his head when he closes his eyes.'" - Cornelius
192 pages, approx. 6.75" x 9.75", full color, hardcover. Published by Cornelius, 2022.
Please enter code "PICKUP" at checkout to take off shipping for in-store pickup.
Please email [email protected] for international shipping
