Toshio Saeki Fievres Nocturnes

French published 2022 first edition. Toshio Saeki Fièvres Nocturnes.

A cult artist, Toshio Saeki is the inventor of a unique style, in a field that he has totally transformed, the 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 through 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 disillusion .

Human society, its violence and its flaws are the support of scenes whose cruelty provokes fear or laughter, pushing the mechanics of fantasy to its limits. Sadomasochism does not cover any reality here, drawing from dreamlike a form of macabre poetry. Stimulated by the censorship that is rampant in Japan - it is forbidden to show the sexes - Saeki makes the prohibition an artistic constraint and deports to the absurd and dreamlike the oldest subject in the world. His precise style, which reminds Europeans of the famous "clear line" of Hergé and Joost Swarte, remains strange for the Japanese reader as for the Western reader, each finding in this trait of perfect simplicity a form of unprecedented exoticism. This perception can only be explained by the absolute originality of an extravagant picture book, straight from the pen of an artist who has devoted his life to tracing as closely as possible "what takes place in his head when he closes the eyes ".