Les Chants de Maldoror (Complete set of 6 booklets)

Jean-Vincent Simonet
Les Chants de Maldoror (Complete set of 6 booklets)

Photographs: Jean-Vincent Simonet

Text: Isidore Ducasse (Lautréamont)

Publisher: Self-published

288 pages

Year: 2014

Comments: Softcover, 30,2 x 21,9 cm, b&w and color photographs. Complete set of 6 booklets. All are numbered edition of 200. In very good condition other than traces of use. The booklet number one has orange marks on the back cover. The number five is signed and dedicated by Jean-Vincent Simonet. Text in French.

Faced with the flood, the abundance but also the disembodiment of images in the 21st century, Jean-Vincent Simonet aspires to revive their aura and their physicality. With their hallucinatory colours, liquid shapes and shifting contours, the young artist's photographs are distinctly painterly: urbanity dissolves into phantasmagorical skies illuminated by the city’s lights, petals become liquid stains dripping onto each other, naked bodies resemble cyborgs or dolls with their supernatural shine and hues, while industrial machines are reduced to abstraction, a jumble of blurred and contrasting components. (From the artist's website)

In this series of publications Jean-Vincent Simonet dialogues with Les Chants de Maldoror written by Isidore Ducasse (Lautréamont) in 1869. Each of the 6 booklets explore a theme important from the writer such as romanticism, chaos, bestiality, science, intimacy and literacy.