Artists theyve collaborated with
range from unknown europeans with unlikely pseudonyms, Moulinex, Blex Bolex
and Y5P5! to established figures like Gary Panter. Ignored by the French
art establishment and treated like genuine outsider artists Le Dernier
Cri have been forced to built up their own network of misfit artists by
seeking out and publishing comic art delinquents from around the world.
Le Dernier Cri books provide a home and outlet for a disparate selection
of artists working away from any critical spotlight, whos work straddles
the high art /lowbrow culture divide, confuses critics and curators and
isnt in danger of becoming fashionable or trendy anytime soon.

Vibrantly screenprinted, with
elaborate fold-out pages Le Dernier Cri publications are hand made in editions
of 150 copies, selling for just £15-20, in a fancy bookshop they
could easily sell for twice as much as limited edition, signed, numbered
collectors items Le Dernier Cri stick to their principles and sell at affordable
prices, it would be pointless for them to make books they couldnt afford
themselves.

Recent books include; Burning
Monster by 1980s RAW magazine alumni and designer of Pee Wees Playhouse,
Gary Panter, this collection of ultra-scratchy, almost self-obliterating
sketches of monsters and monster trucks alongside holiday and wedding scenes
reminds me of those biro-scrawl encrusted B&H packets found on pub
tables.

Caroline et Ses Amis, which takes
its title from a famous childrens book is Caroline Surys obsessive, scratchy
sketchbook wonder around Marseille, calling in at the Post Office and Boulangerie,
running the gamut of loitering track-suited youths and dropping in on numerous
bars and friends studios along the way.

In Noeud, by Moulinex, we find
ourselves in a fantastic forest of menacing phallic tree creatures where
trees sprouting hands and tenderly embracing saplings.

Group Sex Explosion by Andy Bolus,
is a collection of repellent yet fascinating porno collage comic strips
and mutant orgies, interspersed with fake ads for fearsome looking sex
toys, this man clearly has too much time on his sticky hands, and a bookcase
which only has a top shelf.

Mike Dianas Sketchbook illustrates
why his infamous Boiled Angel comics were found so offensive by a Florida
Court that they actually banned him from drawing for several months!

Whilst at art school in 1993,
Pakito Bolino immersed himself fully in the Paris underground arts scene,
playing in lo-fi/punk bands and hanging out at Un Regard Modern bookshop,
meeting artists and bookmakers who sold their publications and exhibited
at the shops monthly exhibitions. Energized by the do-it-yourself spirit
Bolino set up a screenprint workshop in a large squatted building in the
Paris suburbs, and the first incarnation of Le Dernier Cri was born, and
with plenty of creative squatters around to help out, started printing
his own work and inviting friends and artists whose work he admired to
collaborate on books.

Relocating to Marseille in 1995
Le Dernier Cri embarked on a prolific publishing schedule which has culminated
over the last 2 years with the mammoth Hopital Brut project. Hopital Brut-conceived
as an asylum for artists has taken the form of a touring exhibition, Video
and annual Magazine.

Hopital Brut #4 Megazine is a
300 page monster of a publication with foldout posters, a boardgame, and
multiple small booklets and comics bound within its covers, printed in
a myriad of colours this showcase publication provides secure accomodation
for the rantings and scribbles of 80 graphic reprobates, a worldwide selection
of misfit artists from Europe, Japan the UK and USA.

The 45 minute Video features
25 short lunatic animation sequences and takes the form of a visit to the
Hopital Brut calling in at each of the wards to observe the heavily medicated
inmates/artists. It was originally commissioned by national French TV channel,
Canal Plus, who got a little bit more than they bargained for, and eventually
decided to show only half the material they had paid for.

Hopital Brut-the Exhibition features
paintings, prints, sculpture and animation props from the video. Entirely
self organised and without any outside funding, the Hopital Brut exhibition
worked along the lines of a punk band tour, picking up momentum and new
venues as it travelled, with visitors who saw the exhibition in one location
saying Hey why dont you bring Hopital Brut to my town/country Pakito Bolino
performed a live soundtrack for the Video at each show, collaborating with
local musicians. To date the exhibition has been seen at 13 venues in Slovenia,
Belgium, Holland, Finland, Switzerland and Germany. There are plans to
pack everything into a large van and bring it to Londons Chamber of Pop
Culture, Bloomsbury in 2001.

Such a prolific output brings
to mind the image of a manic army of screenprinting splatterpunks permanently
zonked-out on ink fumes, but amazingly the core of Dernier Cri is just
Pakito and partner Caroline Sury with a couple of hardworking volunteers.

With half a dozen new books already
in production, plans for 2001 include further animation projects in a new
dedicated studio space, and a catalogue for the entire Hopital Brut project.
When asked for a statement, Pakitos message is simple; Send your Dirty
Drawings. if he likes them theyll be included in the next Hopital Brut
Magazine and if he REALLY likes them, you could end up with your own book!

APOCALYPSE MAINTENANT Doug Harvey ( LA Weekly, August 1-7, 2003)

French-filtered transgressive graphics at Track 16.

The French expression le dernier cri translates idiomatically as "the
latest fashion," but literally as "the last cry," as of a dying culture.
The French DIY publishing collective that goes by that name has, over
the past 10 years, managed to tread a fine line between the two -
issuing a torrent of urgent, violently apocalyptic picture books
that showcase the most exciting international graphic artists
around in a medium rooted in the independent production and
distribution strategies of the '90s zine underground.

When I first encountered its lavish, hand-screen-printed
collections of comix-based images, I assumed that Le Dernier
Cri was some kind of deep-pocketed vanity project instigated by a
wealthy collector/patron in Europe, where comic art has always received
a certain respect and support, both institutional and popular. How else
could an independent publishing concern manage to produce what
amounts to bound limited-edition albums of original prints -
averaging more than a dozen uniquely designed titles per year -
and sell them for peanuts? I recently learned the answer, from
LDC co-founder Caroline Sury: Do all the work yourself, and
never give up in the face of indifference, whether from the high
art world, or the low.

Sury was in Los Angeles to collaborate with contributing artist and
"West Coast Ministress of Propaganda" Georganne Deen on the first
U.S. exhibition of Dernier Cri artifacts at Track 16 Gallery in
Bergamot Station. LDC began when Sury, who had been producing
a post-punk industrial zine called Hello Happy Taxpayer, met
multimedia whirlwind Pakito Bolino and relocated with him
from Bordeaux to Paris and then to Marseilles to set up a studio and
explore and combine their interests in the laborious, relatively high
end medium of serigraphy and the further reaches of comix art. At
first LDC primarily showcased the couple's own work, but soon
found itself serving a rapidly expanding global community of
underground artists.

LDC's only obvious precedent is RAW magazine, a beautifully
offset-printed comix anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise
Mouly in the 1980s. Some of the most interesting artists who came up
through RAW - like Gary Panter of Jimbo/Pee-wee's Playhouse fame and
Mark Beyer of Amy & Jordan (both of whom have published in the L.A.
Weekly) wound up working with LDC as well. But after the first few
issues, RAW began to take on more and more of the kind of upscale
East Coast toniness that led to a Pulitzer Prize (for Spiegelman)
and a gig at The New Yorker (for Mouly). Which is cool. But you're
never going to see the work of expatriate Minnesotan and LDC
regular Stu Mead on the cover of that venerable publication.

Of course, the way things are going, you probably won't be seeing
Mead's work being published anywhere in these United States. Mead's
art - like that of many LDC favorites - tends to the transgressive,
specifically a penchant for surreal, voyeuristic scenes of salacious
middle-aged men and exuberantly perverse schoolgirls, a recipe for
unwanted official attention in America. Mead caught heat for his
zine Manbag and has since moved to Berlin. Mike Diana, the only
American ever forbidden by law to make art, has done several books
for LDC. Fredox, Jonathan Rosen, Laetitia, and Henriette Valium
(whose own Montreal-based silk-screened comix led to an early LDC
alliance) have contributed to the photo-collage house style revolving
around medical atrocities and sexual torture.

The violence, sexuality and angst of much of this work may be
provocative, but the Grand Guignol tradition has played an important
role in both post-punk industrial culture (even from before Nine
Inch Nails) and comic books from the EC horror era to the
phantasmagorical debaucheries of Zap. (And Marseilles is, after
all, the hometown of archetypal expressionist madman Antonin
Artaud.) Compared to the remarkable formal accomplishment,
the shock value seems beside the point.

Perhaps the most accomplished unknown championed by the LDC
is Moulinex, a French artist whose inexhaustible visual vocabulary
and seemingly effortless painting and design skills overflow in his
four-part series, Art-pute Carnet. The fact that someone so obviously
gifted in traditional visual art has come to any public attention
only through the sponsorship of a renegade group like LDC is
testimony to the cultural xenophobia that characterizes The
Art World. Although LDC has recently started issuing actual
wall-hanging framable prints, its inroads into The Art World still
consist pretty much of . . . a show at Track 16. And Moulinex isn't
alone - flipping through any issue of LDC's ongoing anthology zine
Hopital Brut (which has to date printed work by artists from 100
different countries), you are continually startled by the daring,
the beautiful and the completely unexpected.

While individual artists have their relative strengths, much of the
integrity of the LDC catalog lies in its visual consistency: Most of
the photographic work leans toward the purplish
bleached-by-the-sun-in-the-drugstore-window end of the spectrum,
while the work that exploits silk-screen's unparalleled affinity for
layering usually employs garish fluorescent orange and pink or metallic
inks. This consistency of palette is a result of the DIY nature of
LDC - most of the color choices are made during the printing
process by Bolino, Sury and whoever else happens to be working
the screens. In many ways, Le Dernier Cri can be seen as one
large collective artwork- collaborative in nature but funneled
through the distinctive aesthetics of Bolino and Sury.

Nowhere is this element of Gesamtkunstwerk - "total artwork" -
more apparent than in the feverish compilations of animated sequences
produced since 1997 by LDC's cinematic arm, Le Plateau Symetrique,
and screened in Track 16's tiny back gallery. With dense, careening
experimental soundtracks assembled by Bolino and friends, these
relentlessly paced mishmashes of costumed live action, puppetry
and every imaginable form of animation this side of Pixar are
nevertheless utterly cohesive. This is partly due to each having
a rough narrative structure - Le DernierCri (1997) walks us
through the publishing process (if by "walk" you mean to
stagger through a waterlogged carnival freak show with a
headful of acid), while Hopital Brut (1999) offers almost
an hour's worth of vignettes set inside a nightmarish
psychiatric facility. This fall (in addition to at least three
new books and a revamped Web site at www.lederniercri.org),
a new film anthology on the theme of "savage religions" will
tour Europe, if not L.A. C'est dommage!

LE DERNIER CRI: Legendary Publishers of the International Underground | Track 16
Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. C1, Santa Monica | Through August 16 | 2003 | (310) 264-4678

Caroline Sury is a wild graphic artist/illustrator, comics creator and musician from Marseilles,
where she lives with Pakito Bolino and their son Oscar. Together they run a silk-screen
workshop/publishing house/film studio called Le Dernier Cri. They produce wildly beautiful
silk-screened publications (books and posters, as well as the magazine Hopital Brut)
and hard-core animated films filled with artwork by various known and unknown
art brut/visionary artists (Caroline also contributed the sculptured puppet
animation in their films). Caroline studied fine arts in Bordeaux. In the
early nineties, she made several silk-screened portfolios, including Dog
Time, Scenes d'un Cirque and Bete Verte. Further, she worked on a number
of 'comics travel-notebooks', such as Le stylo a strip-tease and Holidays
in Blobby land. With the work FridaGastro, an account of Caroline's
gastrointestinal infection in all its horrific detail, she began
exploring the autobiographic genre. In the series Caroline et
ses amis (two books published so far), she is telling her life
story and portraying her friends; in the instalment Cupidon
Vinaigre, for instance, she assembles silk-screened portraits
of love partners from the international comics community. Recently
she began a new girls-only series called Vagina Mushroom, where she edits
comic strips and illustrations by female artists (two issues have already
been published and she is looking for new contributions!). Caroline makes her
living as an illustrator (for such publications as Liberation, Le Monde, Beaux-Arts,
and the New York Press). Her most recent published book (almost all are
published by Le Dernier Cri) is Couscous Sardine, a collection of watercolour
illustrations about life in Marseilles that originally appeared in the Marseilles
newspaper L'Hedbo

Artist Pakito Bolino spreading explicit graphics since 1993
Brussels 15/09/2017 Kurt Snoekx - BRUZZ
With a 24-year-long death rattle that is still going strong, Pakito Bolino has inspired a whole
scene of graphic artists. A joint exhibition with Mattt Konture at Sterput celebrates his
fabulously furious filth, while his publishing house Le Dernier Cri is the guest of honour at
the screen-printing festival 2000 Feuilles.
Pakito Bolino won't go down easy. The death rattle that he promisingly emitted in 1993 in
the form of the publishing platform, screen-printing studio, and residence space Le Dernier
Cri and that has inspired whole generations of artists to entrust the deepest stirrings of their
souls, their obsessions, fears, and desires to paper with unbridled freedom and graphic
ecstasy, has been rolling along for almost a quarter century.

As they say: ill weeds grow apace... And more even, they flourish in places that are literally
and figuratively becoming wastelands. Like at Friche la Belle de Mai, a space housed in the
former Seita tobacco factory in Marseille, where about 400 creative minds attempt to
harvest the fruits of their imaginations every day. "When Le Dernier Cri moved here, it was
still a complete friche, an abandoned and dilapidated building with many unused spaces,"
Pakito Bolino tells us. But before the star of Le Dernier Cri stopped over Marseille, there
was Paris. "I studied fine arts in Angouleme and then moved to Paris. At a studio there that
was publishing the first silk screens by people like Charles Burns, I learned to screen-print.
Thanks to Un Regard Moderne (late Jacques Noel's legendary Parisian underground
bookshop - KS), I met a whole scene of artists, people who created fanzines out of
photocopies and things."

"At that time, I was mostly involved in music and I rehearsed in a squat on the outskirts of
Paris, the CAES (Centre Autonome d'Experimentation Sociale - KS) in Ris-Orangis. They
had a serigraphy studio that was barely being used and that is where I founded Le Dernier
Cri with Caroline Sury. In the early years, it was just the name of the magazine that was
completely serigraphic and which brought together the work of the Parisian scene at the
time: Pierre La Police, Stephane Blanquet, etc."

"We released a new issue every other month. When we started publishing monographs and I
met more and more authors, I also started publishing the work of international artists.
Three years later, we had outgrown the squat, so we started looking for a city that was less
expensive and where we could find space to house our serigraphy studio. So we moved to
Marseille, where I found everything I needed."

Burning out with Freud. He didn't need much. "In this medium, you control everything
yourself. Serigraphy is a method of reproducing things that can be relatively inexpensive.
You can just do it at home at the kitchen table, so to speak. It is one of the ways of
celebrating your freedom as an artist. You can produce whatever you want, and being
independent is very important to me. And then there are the colours..."

Absolutely, the colours! The publications by Le Dernier Cri burst out of their paper seams.
They are flashing, labyrinthine explorations above, beneath, in, and between burning bodies,
through sultry nerve bundles, unrelenting delusions, bloody nightmares, and inescapable
phantasms. Taboo-smashing filth and fury that assaults both form and content. Violent
attacks on a blood-shot retina that attempts in vain to pry itself away from the indelible and
unforgettable images. Enough material to give Freud a burn-out several times over.

But the skewering dicks, swollen labia, cosmi-comic monsters, and slimy excretions are
more than just that. Le Dernier Cri offers shelter to a celebration of creative freedom and a
maniacal relationship with images and their powers of expression. It is a potent middle
finger to ideological purism and the dearth of ideas, and a torture chamber for all the isms
that are thriving so abundantly nowadays.

"It is important that there are still places for freedom and creation," Pakito Bolino says.
"Even more so now than when we first founded Le Dernier Cri, when you consider the
resurgence of all the extremes - the far-right in particular -, the moral crusaders, and the
guardians of religion,and all the ridiculous thoughts that come to the surface in their
slipstream." "It is no coincidence that it is now that we are under attack, receive death
threats, and are being threatened with a lawsuit. Even though I have been making books for
years... It shows the resurgence of a certain mentality, it's a fascist impulse.
Making books, creating art, is always a form of resistance."

Hit me baby one more time Or it is at Le Dernier Cri anyway. "Make me the book nobody
else is willing to make for you," is what artists in residence at Le Dernier Cri are told. Don't
hold back, let loose completely, and follow your gut instincts. It is a frightening sort
of freedom, but also one that is infectious. Brussels screen-printing prodigies like Boris
Pramatarov and Quentin Mabuse do not hide their admiration for Le Dernier Cri and its
godfather Pakito Bolino, and refer to the heretical sanctuary as the primal spark that ignited
their passion for the medium.

"Graphic infection," is how Pakito Bolino describes his ambition. "Instead of some stupid
disease or other that kills people, it is better to transmit an infection that changes people's
perspective on things. And admit it, serigraphy is not bad compared to all the junk that gets
rammed down your throat on TV. It's like a hard drug, once you're hooked,
you can't do without."

And the virus is spreading. For almost 25 years and in more than 400 publications - both
monographs and collections, posters, album covers, etc. - since the first publication,
Le Dernier Cri's vocal cords and tentacles have reached far beyond the national borders.
The list of participating artists is impressive and reads as a who's who of the global
underground scene, from Charles Burns to Marc Brunier-Mestas, from Mattt Konture to
Daisuke Ichiba, and from Moolinex to Marcel Ruijters. So it is no coincidence that Brussels
is celebrating Pakito Bolino twice over the coming days. His publishing house from
Marseille is the guest of honour at the 2000 Feuilles serigraphy festival. And E2 is again
lifting the lid of its Sterput for "Infamous Monster Trip", a four-handed exhibition by Pakito
Bolino and Mattt Konture, an icon of the fanzine scene and co-founder of the renowned
publisher L'Association.

And Cinema Nova is screening two films by Francis Vadillo on the ethics and energy of the
underground, before ending the night with an eardrum-shattering concert by Pakito Bolino,
Mattt Konture, and Fredox. "As you can see, I am still the slave of Le Dernier Cri. While
I actually just wanted to get hideously rich... Everything failed!" Pakito Bolino grins.

Georganne Deen
"Despite an impressive list of solo exhibitions around the world and having her work included
in many noteworthy private collections, Georganne Deen remains one of the most underrated
and under-the-radar painters in contemporary art. Her work begs comparison with that of
painter, cartoo nist, and fellow Texas native Gary Panter: They are both pioneers who excel
at destroying the boundaries between painting, illustration, comics, and music. Deen's work
teeters between high and low, using striking imagery and ornamental decoration to create
trippy storybook visions with a feminine twist. Her music, which streams on her website
Western Witch, is haunting and humble, sometimes soothing, and highly effective in its
dreamy storytelling."
www.artinfo.com
http://www.westernwitch.com/