First published: Fall 2014
How much punch can any one picture dare to deliver? Think of the atmosphere surrounding Edvard Munch’s tortured figure in his 1893 Expressionist masterpiece, The Scream, and throw in, on steroids, the sexy, spooky, transgressive vibe that oozes from grade-B horror movies, Japanese manga, underground comics, gritty porn, punk rock music and punk record sleeves, and, of course, the unfiltered, unbridled creative energy of the most powerful outsider art. Now throw in some extra doses of sex, death and violence, along with freewheeling styles of drawing, in which human figures, often nude, scowl, grimace, writhe and cavort, sometimes merging into plant or animal forms or all but disappearing in sprawling phantasmagorias of visual commotion.
A work by Tomahawk
Since the early 1990s, from their base in Marseilles, the rough-and-tumble port city on the Mediterranean coast of southern France, Pakito Bolino and his collaborators at Le Dernier Cri, a non-profit organisation that is part publishing outfit, part exhibition venue and part laboratory for artistic experimentation (and mischief), have been whipping up just this kind of unstoppable visual overload.
Their favourite outlets for their creations – some of the most outrageous, compelling images to be found anywhere in the art world today – have included handmade, limited-edition booklets and magazines that have defied easy classification. In French, their rallying cry proclaims, “Vomir des yeux!” (or, as they put it in English on their website, “Puking eyeballs!”).
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #83
