Image builder Elzo Durt's collected work published in one book

What is the effect of wandering around fourteen years of Elzo Durt's mouth-foaming productivity? You come out somewhat battered, very short of breath, rabid, slightly aroused, mildly appalled, convulsing, mutating, more kicking than alive, but also mouth-watering from twisted lips about the sheer quantity and quality of the images he casts into the world.

They are iconoclastic visions of an underground universe, packed with degenerate but all too human characters, on the edge of death, beyond repair. Breakable bodies, bendable minds. In Elzo's universe you can see "Gustave Doré dancing on a carpet of razor blades or Terry Gilliam his throat slit over Franquin's drawing board," as Lelo Jimmy Batista puts it in Elzo Durt's recently published Complete Works 2003-2016. What you experience is "panic-stirring like an all-out escape or a never-ending party".

And all this from a youth spent among his father's record sleeves and his mother's Soviet propaganda posters, lousy drawing skills (his words!), an utter fascination for rousing, distorted music, a defining encounter with the stuff that poured out of the perverted brains of graphic art collectives like Pakito Bolino's Le Dernier Cri or Bon Goût, an enormously varied collection of books, magazines, and comics, and an uncompromising nature that generates total creative freedom, boundless fantasy, and an unmistakeably personal touch – see for example his DIY gallery Plin Tub' and his label Teenage Menopause Records.

Stupefyingly attractive
Elzo Durt's Complete Works 2003-2016 collects one of our most prolific image builders' flyers and posters for parties and concerts (Recyclart, Madame Moustache, Rockerill…), record sleeve designs (Le Prince Harry, Thee Oh Sees, or for the Born Bad Records label that decided to collect and publish this psychedelic tome…), press illustrations, and personal works.

From a tribute to Guy Peellaert and Charles Burns, an orgasmic tribute to pornographer Ron Jeremy, heretical services, a dissection of Jimi Hendrix, party snapshots of allergic women, and an autopsy of Michael Jackson, to a different take on Bin Laden (the full frontal one!)… Elzo Durt's computer wizardry digs up immaculate, vibrantly coloured, incredibly detailed, stupefyingly attractive compositions from the entrails of a deranged society, a visual culture ranging from old engravings to constructivism, kick-ass music, and the apocalyptic clash of all those things. Now dance, motherfuckers, dance!