Artist Pakito Bolino spreading explicit graphics since 1993

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 Angoulême 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 Noël’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’Expérimentation 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, Stéphane 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 Cinéma 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.

> Festival: 2000 FEUILLES. 16/09 & 17/09, Pianofabriek, Sint-Gillis
> Pakito Bolina & Mattt Konture. 21/09 > 21/10, Sterput (Brussels) & 22/09, 19.30, Cinéma Nova (Brussels)

2000 FEUILLES
SCREENPRINTING SHOWCASE

In addition to a focus on its guest of honour Le Dernier Cri, the brainchild that Pakito Bolino has kicked to adulthood over the course of 24 years and more than 400 publications, the festival 2000 Feuilles has much more in store. The collaboration between Pianofabriek and La Maison des Jeunes “La Clef”, which aims to showcase screen-printing as a medium, is organising an exhibition of posters on the theme of the abecedarium, but also a catwalk on which the young participants of the summer courses at La Clef will show their own clothing and mask designs, workshops, screenings, a bicycle screen-printer, live printing sessions, and concerts (by Phoenician Drive, La Negra Albina, and others)…

But also a MicroMarché, which will allow you to buy the cleaned fruits of other people’s dirty work. And there are some gems, like the works of L’appât for example, the studio/residence space that Quentin Pillot/Mabuse and Rebecca Rosen have built around their original Heidelberg in Vorst/Forest and that already resulted in astonishingly beautiful work by Camilla Falsini, Mathieu Desjardins, Boris Pramatarov, and Jamie Q.

Or the treasure that Galerie E² has been digging up from the underground, diamonds cut by people like Bryan Beast, Arnaud Rochard, Francesco Defourny, and Marie-Pierre Brunel. But there will also be work by the artisans of Ice Screen, Chantal Purcell O’Byrne’s Loup², which creates original clothing and accessories with screen-printing, the Namur-based Chocs et ennui, and the Brussels-based butchers at La Boucherie Moderne. There is plenty of meat on this bone.