Night fevers

An artist with a real cult following, Toshio Saeki is the inventor of a unique style, in a field that he completely transformed, ero guro — which we can be translated as "erotic-grotesque scenes". This genre, which is attributed to paternity to the writer Edogawa Ranpo, finds its source in the origins of the drawing classic Japanese, full of monsters and nightmarish scenes from numerous prints throughout time. Saeki, by declining the motifs traditional and mixing them with his own obsessions, echoed the anxieties of his generation, the youth of the 1970s, who believed they could to free oneself from the conventions of a paternalistic society before knowing the disillusionment. Human society, its violence and its defects are the support of scenes whose cruelty provokes fear or laughter, pushing in its entrenchments the mechanics of fantasy. Sado-masochism does not cover here no reality, drawing from the dream world a form of macabre poetry. Stimulated by censorship in Japan — it is forbidden to show the genitals — Saeki does from the forbidden an artistic constraint and deports towards the absurd and the oneiric the oldest subject in the world. Its precise style, which reminds Europeans of the famous "clear line" of Hergé and Joost Swarte, remains strange for the reader Japanese as well as for the Western reader, each finding in this trait the perfect simplicity a form of unprecedented exoticism. This perception cannot be explained than by the absolute originality of an extravagant imager, straight out of the pen of an artist who has devoted his life to tracing as closely as possible "what is unfolds in his head when he closes his eyes."