Author: Stefano Zago

Fragonard at the Musée du Luxembourg

FRAGONARD AT THE MUSÉE DU LUXEMBOURG
Pen on watercolour paper (perforated on top)
20 x 30 cm
November 2015

I made this drawing on invitation at the Musée du Luxembourg, in Paris, during the exhibition dedicated to Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
A few days after the November 2015 attacks, in a militarised and frightened Paris, I sought an evening of peace in the drawing. Given my state of mind, my drawing was reduced to a single panel, where I represented the works, their sensuality in a context so contrasted with the situation I was in. I wanted to represent in the work also to the other artists present, considering our work, like the works we study, an act of resistance against barbarism and obscurantism.

The ballad of Sexual Dependency

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Drawings on Sketchbook
Pen and Ink
2015

On the occasion of the release of Nan Goldin’s film All the beauty and the bloodshed, I offer these drawings made during the screening at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2015, with music by the Tiger Lillies.

“

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, made between 1979 and 1986, is one of Nan Goldin’s earliest photographic series, but remains today, and rightly so, the best known of all her works. The slide show projected on a large screen is accompanied by the Tiger Lillies. A London musical trio, they are dark, provocative and blasphemous, grimacing with their Brechtian inspiration which fits perfectly with the images. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a masterpiece, an authentic chronicle of modern times.

“*

Nan Goldin, fotography

The Tiger Lillies
Martyn Jacques, Adrian Stout, Jonas Golland

* Source: Philharmonie de Paris
https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/activite/spectacle/16677-nan-goldin-tiger-lillies

Fanzines at the BNF

Free press and fanzines: the alternative press in France, from the 1960s to the present day

A real mass phenomenon, with its own codes, distribution networks and events on the fringes of mainstream culture, the alternative press remains little known in France.

Appearing by the hundreds in the wake of May ’68 and the British and American counterculture, independent newspapers and sheets offer a young public the subjects that the “serious” press dismisses – pop and rock music, ecology, nuclear power, regionalist movements, sexuality, street entertainment, feminism, pacifism -, treated in an iconoclastic and radical tone. Charlie Hebdo, Actuel and Le Parapluie are the most successful and enduring flagships of an underground wave that was sweeping through a generation of baby-boomers who were building their own culture as an alternative to the dominant ideology.*

*text @ BNF : https://www.bnf.fr/fr/agenda/free-press-et-fanzines-la-presse-alternative-en-france-des-annees-1960-nos-jours