Gilles Berquet (1956 - )
Related: erotic art - French art - Mďrka Lugosi
Influenced by: Pierre Molinier - Clovis Trouille
Profile
Berquet is one of the driving forces in the
European fetish erotica scene. He is also the editor of maniac. Kinky fetish and bondage photography with a film noir feel. Carefully posed with obvious illusions to the subrosa fetish
photography of 1920's Paris, the photos maintain a caught in the act modernity. Berquet is one of the driving forces in the
European fetish scene. He is also the editor of maniac.
Interview
In Secret Mag
Who are your artistic influences?
Clovis Trouille and Georges Bataille, both of whom were on the margins of Surrealism, but principally the painter and photographer Pierre Molinier. --http://www.secretmag.com/Secret/Best14/Berquet.htm, accessed May 2003
Maniac
This French-language, digest size magazine of erotic art is an above average but not outstanding addition to the Eurosex scene. The third issue has a series of old time photos of lasses with generous rumps from the 1930s and earlier. Another article seems to focus on breasts, with women baring everything from mondo jugs to small perky mams. There's a drawing of a woman suctioning her right breast and a picture of another woman with one of her big floppy tatas thrown over the back of a chair. Certainly the most attention-getting images come from illustrator Yoshifumi Hayashi. His physically impossible drawings are a tangle of limbs, brains, sex organs, and exotic fruits.Maniac/Editions Astarté/58 rue Amelot/75011 Paris/France
--http://www.mindpollen.com/book/sex3.htm [Jan 2005]
Maniac
Maniac
In psychiatry a maniac is a person who suffers the mental disease called mania. This type of personality shows an emotionally expansive behaviour, hyperirritability, excess of loquacity, hyperkinesis (hyperactivity and inability to pay attention), and an excessive imagination. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac [Apr 2005]
see also: psychiatry - behaviour - attention - imagination - mental illness
Maniac, revue d’amour critique, magazine published by Les Éditions Astarté, edited by Gilles Berquet
image sourced here.
For several decades, we have been hunting down erotic pictures in all its forms, and photographs in particular. Thus, we have accumulated thousands of documents about the most diverse issues. Today, thanks to the Internet, we are able to put the collection at your disposal. Some of these pictures have already been used in order for us to make books such as Yva Richard, l’âge d’or du fétichisme, Collection privée de Monsieur X, L’album obscène d’un photographe anonyme, or else to illustrate our magazine Maniac, revue d’amour critique. Via this website, under the heading Les Archives d’Éros, we put at your disposal hundreds of unique and previously unpublished documents, typical of the European production - especially the French production - dating back from 1860 to 1950. You will be given a free access to a part of the pictures offered on sale, and another part, much more substantial, will be available by subscription.
Being fascinated by the searching in this sphere, we have opened in 1991 the Galerie Les Larmes d’Éros, located 58 rue Amelot in the XIe district of Paris, a bookshop which promotes the ancient as well as the contemporary erotic art, in all its forms. Every year, we put on about ten exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists. Via this website, you will get the opportunity to discover or get in touch with the artists and purchase the work that could appeal to you. With the same view, we have created the Éditions Astarté, which publishes about two books a year and a magazine: Maniac, revue d’amour critique. Our publications are not directed to the people we commonly name the “general public”. We are dealing here with meticulous books, of bibliophilism, turned out by the hundred, generally numbered, dealing with the secret and intimate world of erotic art. Our publications are available only in few bookshops, including Les Larmes d’Éros, and now on this website. --http://www.erosconnexion.com/avert_anglais.htm [Apr 2005]
see also: Paris - erotic art
Links
Books
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Mademoiselle - Mirka Lugosi, Marie-Laure Dagoit[Amazon US]
Mirka Lugosi, one of France's leading illustrators, has carved her own niche in the specialized field of fetish art. Considered marginal in the 1970s, she blossomed in the late 1980s when acceptance of S/M and fetishism provided new outlets for her work. With influences ranging from De Sade to Man Ray, Lugosi’s art blends a mastery of color, dreamlike compositions, old-fashioned props, and a sense of humor as it celebrates the extremes of sensual enjoyment. -
Le Banquet (2000) - Gilles Berquet [1 book, Amazon US]
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Gilles Berquet: La Solitude des Anges (1994) - Gilles Berquet[1 book, Amazon US]
The photographs of Gilles Berquet present a fine sense of classic eroticism within a sexual and artistic contradiction. Working with "girl friends" rather than professional models, this collection depicts women captured in bondage ensembles and often in motion. The paradox is exposed in the expressions of the subjects, who exude an acute sense of sexual freedom and erotic breakthrough within their bondage costumes; it is the constraints themselves that seem to have set these women free. In his notes, Koharto Lizawa comments that "the women even appear to have tied themselves up . . . Berquet simply lent them a hand toward accomplishment of that desire." Classically realized in black and white, these images are sensual in nature with an underlying theme of sociosexual commentary.