Screen printer, colourist, comic book author and musician, Pakito is joint founder of Dernier Cri, a free-wheeling, anti-conformist graphic artists’ collective that celebrated its 20th birthday in 2013. «That was capital punishment year for culture!» he jokes. This fiercely independent publisher stands at a junction between avant-garde alternative mangas and all that is underground, outsider and deviant in art.
Death and rebellion
Arriving in Marseille from a Parisian squat, his head full of images from underground comix like Hara-Kiri and Raw, Pakito (and chums) launched Dernier Cri in a studio at La Friche Belle de Mai, where they spew out limited-edition books, 3D images, posters, screen prints and films, publishing every possible form of offbeat expression in a catalogue of over 300 publications. Pakito likes to build artistic links – be it with MIAM in Sète, Japanese graphic artists or kids from Marseille’s sink estates who come to see and learn, creating screen-printed books and filming costume dramas.
Mangaro and Heta-Uma exhibitions
Above the studio, Le Cartel is hosting Mangaro (portmanteau for «manga» and Garo, a Japanese magazine) in partnership with the Heta-Uma exhibition at MIAM in Sète, which runs until 1 March 2015, curated by Pakito and Ayumi Nakayama (of the Taco Che bookshop in Tokyo). The two shows cover 40 years of the Japanese avant-garde comic mags Garo and Heta-Uma (which means «badly done well done», «mucky but beautiful» or «rough-cast but perfect»; it plays with popular iconography to produce a raw style that’s astonishingly beautiful, drawn with exquisite care despite appearances). An exuberant cornucopia of sound and sight, a welter of drawings, toys, paintings, sounds, videos and kakemonos – like Tokyo.
By Claude Ponsolle
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