cneai

On Wednesday, I went with several others to a museum outside Paris, in Chatou, France. The museum is called CNEAI, or the "Centre national de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé", which as you can probably guess, means the National Center for 'Embossed' and Printed Art. They had a really cool exhibition on display called "Black Noise, A Tribute to Steven Parrino". This exhibit consisted of 32 small printed books, following the "american comic book style", as they said, which were put together by artists and friends of Steven Parrino. This was done as a way to commemorate his life after he died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 46 in 2005. Parrino's work was very punk/rock and he himself was involved in the music scene for a while. His work is heavily comic-y and seemed mostly inspired by destruction, sex, and satanic themes. The 32 comic books, though, were all over the place in terms of artistic themes, focus, etc.

My favorite, which I didn't take a picture of, was a collage of letters, postcards, and photos that Parrino had sent to several of the artists over the years. These artists had put all of these correspondences together, with a couple wikipedia articles on clinical lycanthropy, all to prove that Steven Parrino was, in fact, a werewolf. One of the first pages had a small piece of notepaper on which the artist who had put together the collages had written,
To Do:
Find proof
Draw conclusions.
It was very funny and oddly affectionate. Also, reading penpal letters and postcards from this artist whose life the exhibit was commemorating made Steven Parrino a lot more real. Some proof, if you're interested, was that he died on a full moon, he had written in one of his postcards that he was "growing his hair out" and "waiting for full moons", and a picture of him in sunglasses matches very closely to a picture they found of a big husky wearing sunglasses. Aha! Proof!

Another work was a strange collaged piece that really was entirely over my head. I had no clue what he was getting at. Very heavy on the hermaphrodite, adam and eve, mythology themes. I really liked the artist's frequent plays on words, though. Check this out:



I like the "be sea ch", implying the "search" while writing "beseech". Cool. But I didn't get the ultimate point of his book.

Also, another fave of mine was one artist whose work consisted almost completely of extremely light pencil drawings. This was the cover of her book, and I thought it was so cool. It's hard to see, but it's half of a woman's very scrunched-up face.



And here's one of Parrino's own pages. It's probably the least crazy/sexual/satanic one there. I liked the "live" and "die" in the Trix rabbit's eyes and the extremely mesmerizing look on the man's face on the right. Also, the girl's crazy face as she eats her cereal. So weird.