Walk the Backstreets “Marche à l’ombre”, title of french movie directed by Michel Blanc: staying low-key, moving in the shadows, keeping your head down)
 
Don’t worry—this first issue isn’t a tribute to Jean-Claude Dusse (Michel Blanc 1952–2024). It’s simply for the sake of coherence that the first two paintings you’re about to see carry a cult line from Les Bronzés font du ski (french cult comedy movie)
Boomer punchlines? Maybe. But what can I say—I’m a mogwai born the same year as the dystopian novel by George Orwell. I’m the same age as Marche à l’ombre and the first whole-car graffiti rolling across the Paris Metro.

So to honor this opening double spread, I picked my childhood homie—someone who shares my love for the pop culture that shaped us. He’s also from the diagonale du vide—that stretch of rural France nobody talks about—striking a disillusioned pose, rocking the look of a second-division football supporter and a papier-mâché head.

Through the pages you’re holding in your webbed fingers, I’m about to stimulate your pituitary gland and drown you in a pyroclastic flow of references—just enough to torch whatever neurons you still have left in this fine year of 2026.

In this dehydrated world where narcissism wipes its Balenciaga moon boots across the face of humility, keep this mantra tucked somewhere in the back of your bald spot:

“Forget that you’ve got zero chance—just go for it.
On a misunderstanding, it might actually work.” Punchline of Jean Claude Dusse. 

Get your nails done, trim that mustache, zip up your jumpsuit and hop on the chairlift to my wonderful country. I’m the Bernie Noël of painting, and I didn’t come here to fix the ski lifts. 

Jean-Claude, that mustachioed guy with his triumphant cheesiness, sentimental and dreamy with a body to match, whose crown is a desert where the hair was too lazy to go, already tired of having made it this far. 

 Even though this fragile scavenger would certainly have ended up gutted with his pickup lines in 2026, he embodies the magnificent loser, as clumsy as a panda on acid, convinced he’s won the game when he’s not even on the bench. 

Gold dust on the cracks 

With a moped helmet smashed against the entrance of the insular French film industry, I simply had to mention Albert Dupontel’s Bernie, released in 1996.  Twenty years later, the group Scoop & J.keuz drops their second album, L’acide dans les idées, whose bubbling energy might reflect Bernie Noël’s aggression and all the audacity of its director. MC Jkeuz drills into his brain to extract incisive lyrics, simmered by his producer Scoop, who sharpens the beats just as Bernie sharpens the blade of his shovel on a highway railing through his car window. 

I propose to the two outsiders of French rap that they create the album artwork. I envision the duo as two heretics, in the midst of the puritanical and rigid landscape of French rap. I opt for acid-burn makeup for the lyricist, drawing inspiration from women who have been victims of acid attacks. 

I cover the beatmaker with a plain burlap sack, like Elephant Man in David Lynch’s film, as if to hide a terrifying monstrosity. 

I personally named it the best French rap album of 2014. Should we wait for approval from specialized journalists who suck up to their favorite rappers’ labels so much that their mouths are full of cavities? 

If going back in time makes you queasy, or if your DeLorean got wrecked in a shopping mall parking lot, forcing you to stay in the present—the one where Biff Tannen has become president of the Disunited States for the second time—you can listen to their last three Kintsukuroi albums, released in 2024 and 2025. That’s still the past, you might say, but we always need to glance in the rearview mirror to better dodge the lane-changers of the future. 

Contemporary without being trendy, my cohorts and I from Planet X remain a few comets’ distance from those business-school-trained influencers—so full of themselves they could sell pairs of sneakers shoes to sea lions. Before we dissolve into the Milky Way, we’ll keep kissing the skulls of king cobras, even if it means ending up paralyzed. The art we champion offers no comfort. On one side are the windbags, and on the other, the fire-breathers. 

In this cosmic chaos, if Bernie was born in a dumpster on December 25th, it’s proof enough that Santa Claus is a bastard. 

Bonus references:
Film: Elephant Man by David Lynch, Bernie by Albert Dupontel
Music: L'acide dans les idées by Scoop & J.Keuz

Adapted from a stage play, Le Père Noël est une ordure (Santa Claus is a bastard) is a classic by the famous Splendide theater troupe (Michel Blanc, RIP), in which Gérard Jugnot plays Félix, an alcoholic homeless man dressed as Santa Claus. I had spotted this awning a few days before Christmas Eve: at its base lay a plastic tarp, surely the makeshift bed of a homeless man. This scumbag Santa Claus still doesn’t seem decided on giving gifts to everyone. It’s all about meritocracy these days, kids—the “where there’s a will, there’s a way” philosophy bellowed by those well-fed liberals, who leave  more than a few out in the cold, stomachs frozen. 

My painting finished, I head off the avenue and slip into an adjacent street, where I stumble upon a Lutes painting store and its Jean-Claude Van Damme, all lithe and agile on the subway tracks, straight out of the Full Contact poster. I snap a photo and set off, all smiles, toward Boulevard de la Villette on my acrylic-stained sled. On the sidewalk of this major thoroughfare, I spot a crouching elf filling his sack with spray paint—it’s... Lutes, who has just finished, at this very moment, a composition paying homage to Home Alone (1990). It was an unexpected first meeting; we exchanged a few words and made plans to meet for hot chocolate in the coming days. In early 2025, we’ll create a joint store inspired by Tales from the Crypt. Back in 1993, the episode “"And All Through the House"—which I stumbled upon one Saturday night on M6 after The X-Files—blow my mind with its disgusting killer who’d escaped from an asylum.

Bonus references:
Film: Le père Noël est une ordure by Jean-Marie Poiré, Home alone by Chris Colombus, Serie: Tales from the crypt - And All Through the House by Robert Zemeckis

Flat and Furious

July 2022: One evening in Cassis (a town near Marseille), during a painting event organized by Tchad, we enjoyed a pizza to the sound of cicadas, chatting about movies with Moner and Debza. Debza mentioned a hardcore film that had made a strong impression on him when he was younger, though he couldn’t remember the title. After a few descriptions, he mentions Calvaire by Fabrice Du Welz (seen in theaters in 2004), in which Jackie Berroyer plays a psychopathic innkeeper who kidnaps and tortures a singer from a retirement home.

Synchronicity.

October 2022. I rewatch Une époque formidable (A wonderful time) directed in 1991 by Gérard Jugnot, of which I had only vague memories. I remembered that scene in the subway station, with the brawl between the homeless guys throwing trash over the tracks, or that damn end credits sequence with Francis Cabrel’s music—Tôt ou tard s’en aller—that gives you the blues as big as the bugs in Starship Troopers. (French expression comparing the blues mood to a bug).

My generation, partly raised on TV, grew up with Les Inconnus (a famous comedy trio) and the faces of quintessential French guys like Gérard Jugnot, with his trademark boss-like mustache.

It’s 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 11, 2022, and I’m painting these wooden fences with Cabrel’s music ringing in my ears (an old-timer of French chanson whom my mother adores). The tagline for this mural on Rue de la Roquette will therefore be the title of this film, which, thirty years after its theatrical release, remains timeless in its message. Today’s Paris has as much Botox as it does “valises sous les yeux” (a French expression for tired, puffy eyes); it reeks of the latest Chanel to mask the smell of piss clinging to its grayish skin.

Uber Eats bike delivery riders weave between Quechua tents and the poor bodies lying on the subway ventilation grates—these stranded carcasses rotting like old, expired sausages, waiting to be chewed up by the monster city.

It’s a wonderful time.

I come back later, around 12:30 p.m. I’m wolfing down a plate of food at the brasserie L’Artiste, located right next to my painting, when I see someone walk by—not Gérard Jugnot—but Jackie Berroyer. This veteran of French cinema is striking a pose with his buddy Nicolas Belvalette in front of my jagged creation. I put down my fork to go snap a picture of the scene with them.

Now, imagine the same situation if it had been Timothée Chalamet:

Fleuj — Hey, I’m the one who did the painting behind you.

Timothée — Oh yeah! Crazy, I love it! Do you have a website?… Oh yeah, awesome, that could seriously interest me for a personal project I’m producing… Do you have time for a coffee?

There you go. But I met Jackie Berroyer, this old actor, 78 years old, who’s shaky and walks at a snail’s pace. We get the artists we deserve…

Glory to these films that stain the pristine white tablecloth of bourgeois French cinema with splashes of Villageoise rouge profond (cheap wine drunk by the homeless). To all the devil’s rejects of the street and to Francis Cabrel, for his songs capable of making you cry while high on laughing gas.

Bonus references:
Film: Calvaire by Fabrice Du Welz, Une époque formidable by Gérard Jugnot
Music: Tôt ou tard s'en aller by Francis Cabrel
Book Photographer: Paris Nord by Myr Muratet

Bugs live matter 

January 1998, off to the movies to catch James Cameron’s Titanic on the big screen, the blockbuster that’s been sweeping everything in its path since its release. When we got to the box office, the show was sold out… My two friends and I,  disappointed that we wouldn’t get to see the big ship sink into the depths, had to pick another movie. So off we go to see Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven, director of Basic Instinct, Spetters, Total Recall, RoboCop… 

The opening credits roll, and from the very first scene, the movie smacks us in the face and sucks our brains out by throwing American soldiers sliced in half by giant arachnids at us. Fuck yeah! We’re looking at one of the most violent and subversive sci-fi films of the 2000s. Compared to Kate Winslet, freezing her ass off on a wooden plank while watching thatcold Di Carpaccio meat die in the icy water, we’re not doing so bad. 

Ever since then, I’ve been taming house spiders and making them sit on the living room table in front of miniature police vans—and I’ve been doing this long before I even knew about the incredible 2023 film Vermines, with its final scene where Heteropoda maxima attack cops in an underground parking garage. 

Would you like to know more? 

A prescient film and satire on militarism, Starship Troopers predicted—five years in advance—the U.S. invasion of Iraq following the destruction of the Twin Towers. The army of “good” destroying a foreign civilization with missiles to impose its ideology. It’s 2026; I’ll let you draw the connection. The only good bug is a dead bug.

Bonus references:
Film: Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven, Vermines by Sébastien Vaniček
Book: Paul Verhoeven Total Spectacle by Alex Cadieux

Grab them by the balls 

 
One scene in particular sent shockwaves through conservative America as well as feminist and lesbian movements when Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct was released in 1992: the interrogation scene. 

Suspected of murder, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), sitting in a chair facing four cops, crosses her legs in a way that offers a glimpse of her coochie. The Venetian vixen, cigarette in hand, has just pulled off what’s known in the lingo as an “anasyrma.” A sort of feminist Pokémon attack where flashing your pussy is like getting hit with an ice pick in the urethra. 

With her pussy smacked right in the face, caught off guard, the detectives sweat like pigs in their asshole suits and ties. With the grace of a diva, Catherine calls the shots; her move is so powerful it flips the power dynamic. Pussy power, Kamehameha to the balls. 

As an artist, one has a duty to respond to the present—to subvert it and critique it—in order to better predict or anticipate the future. Even if it means, at times, being misunderstood. Paul Verhoeven 

Bonus references:
Film: Basic Instinct by Paul Verhoeven, Teeth by Mitchell Lichtenstein
Book: Paul Verhoeven - Biographie by Rob Van Sheers
Painting: Bravery of the Persian Women by Frans Francken the Younger (1581-1642)
Le diable de Papefiguière by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1755

Spetters, which means “splashes,” “liquids,” or even “handsome guys,” is the title Paul Verhoeven chose for his 1980 film about Holland’s youth. 

In his works, the characters’ actions—especially those of the women—stem from a survival instinct: Fientje longs for a future other than smelling cooking oil in her shabby chip shop (Spetters), Nomi, the dancer  willing to do anything to conquer Las Vegas and seize her moment of glory by flashing her breasts (Showgirls), or Rachel, an undercover Jewish resistance fighter who sleeps with the Nazi enemy to save her people (Black Book). 

To break free from their circumstances, they have no choice but to trample on rules, morals, and laws to dodge the blows of a sick society dominated by a putrid phallocracy. 

Almost all the women in Paul Verhoeven's films find peace only when they've gotten just what they want. They often win, but they walk over dead bodies. Renée Siutendjik (Fientje in Spetters)

Bonus references
Film: Spetters, Showgirls, Black Book by Paul Verhoeven
Book: Paul Verhoeven - Biographie by Rob Van Sheers, Au Jardin des délices - Entretiens avec Paul Verhoeven by Nathan Réra

 Indigestion

Brian Yuzna, the man behind Re-Animator 2, created one of the craziest films of the ’80s, which I discovered on TV while munching on McCain’s American frozen pizza, half-baked in the microwave. Beneath its syrupy sitcom aesthetic, the ending of Society—for which I was completely unprepared—hit me right in the gut. A social satire of cannibalistic capitalism with a body horror twist, the melted cheese oozing from my thick crust suddenly tasted like sebum and spoiled lymph. 

The final scene is a sort of Puff Daddy-style freak-off party. In a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, jet-setters and politicians are gathered, bathing in champagne. Pink powder and ketamine fumes strip away what little morality the guests have left. All high, a massive, gelatinous orgy kicks off in the backrooms. Cigar in his mouth, Jay-Z gets his ass pounded by a Justin Bieber with an evil grin while Beyoncé shoves her oily hand into DiCaprio’s buttocks (fresh off the Titanic), who merges with Jennifer Lopez’s ass, whose mouth absorbs the monster-boobs of an unfortunate dancer high on GHB. An orgy of the rich where bodies intertwine to feast on the lower classes—a sort of barbecue of the poor in a dripping, high-society frenzy. Apparently, the same parties take place at the french National Assembly. 

Horror has become so mainstream that it seems to have largely lost the transgressive creativity that made it so thrilling. Brian Yuzna

Bonus references:
film: Society, The Dentist by Brian Yuzna
Make up artist: Screaming Mad George

 
An open mind isn’t a skull fracture.

Re-Animator, yet another weird movie you’ll never watch, too caught up in your miserable life as an opiate-addled zombie binge-watching Netflix documentaries about serial killers. Too bad, because you’re missing out on the chance to discover the concept of Herbert West, a doctor trained by Didier Raoult (the French doctor who was criticized during the pandemic) who developed a serum capable of bringing dead organisms back to life—much like your genitals, which are no longer of any use to you since love and humor have become more technical than setting up an old school Canadian tent without tent pegs.

With this miraculous liquid, which celebrity from Père-Lachaise Cemetery could we bring back to life? The answer lies in the photo below, where my buddy is planning to dig up the corpse of the late satirical comedian Pierre Desproges to administer a dose. Once he’s back on his feet, we’d invite this old provocateur, who died in 1988, for a drink on a terrace to ask him what he thinks of our times, and in particular the Guillaume Meurice affair, the sweety humorist ousted from France Inter (France’s most-listened-to radio station) in 2024 for comparing Netanyahu to “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin.”

What would freak out Pierre Desproges in 2026?

 I don’t think there’s such a thing as normality. I think it’s just an idea that everyone wants to cling to. Everyone has monsters inside them, and everyone tries, in one way or another, to keep them in check. Many of my films are about monsters, but they’re not about fighting them—they’re about being one. Stuart Gordon


Bonus references:
Film: Re-Animator, Re-Animator 2, From Beyond by Stuart Gordon

“It knows what scares you” is the tagline for the 1982 film Poltergeist, which tells the story of paranormal phenomena that torment a family in their home. In parapsychology, the term “poltergeist” refers to physical disturbances linked to a person whose mental influence is believed to affect matter. 

Take the example of comedian Guillaume Meurice, acting as a radio poltergeist, who cracks a joke about Benjamin Netanyahu in 2023. 

His punchline then triggers a whole series of supernatural reactions that manifest instantly in the France Inter studios: walls crack, objects move on their own, computers catch fire, the coffee machine bleeds, and the director of Radio France wets herself, convulsing in her chair, eyes glazed over and drool at her lips, like Isabelle Adjani in Possession. 

The media watchdogs then transform into exorcists to burn the mocking witch, in order to purify the airwaves. What amuses some terrifies others. 

This is a chance to ask a few painting-world poltergeists what might have really scared them when they were the same age as the little girl in the movie—captured and locked away in a parallel dimension...
 
Bonus References:
Film: Poltergeist by Tobe Hooper & Steven Spielberg
Book: Dans l’œil du cyclone by Guillaume Meurice

L’Outsider

"I’m four years old. It’s New Year’s Eve 1988 at home, and my older sister and cousin are watching TV in my parents’ bedroom. The movie Gremlins started late in the evening, and I quietly settle in next to them. I watched the entire movie at face value, as if I were watching a nature documentary. At no point did my older relatives reassure me by mentioning the fictional nature of what I’d just watched! For months, I needed a nightlight in my room because they don’t like light, and no water in my room because they reproduce with it!"

Apocalypse

"My biggest fear when I was little was the concept of infinity—in space and time. It was just too much for me to wrap my head around, and the more I learned about astronomy and physics, the more it freaked me out. It was this huge anxiety that kind of mixed everything together—fear of death, of not knowing if anything happens afterward, the incomprehension of being a tiny human child on a rock floating in the universe."

Gome

“I had two recurring nightmares: one where I was being chased by a huge stone ball, followed by an endless, accelerating fall into the void... and another where a stranger would come and stab me in the back with a large knife while I was asleep.”

Hoctez

"I'm really scared of spiders! In Chile, there were some huge ones, and knowing they were predators scared me even more. The ones that dig burrows—those are really the worst for me. Or the super-venomous ones called “araña del ricón” in Chile, which hide in the corners high up in houses in the south… thin, black, and motionless… aragghh"

Fear City (formerly MC Zombi)

"After watching Robocop and the scene where the guy melts in acid, I had nightmares about this guy who was perfectly normal until he swallowed a centipede and transformed just like in Robocop after his acid bath, and then he started chasing me all over the house. I had those nightmares for quite a while, so now I hate those fuckin' centipedes."

Kegrea

Fear of the Dark

Pulse

Fear of the future

Grinsh

“My anxiety stems from a hair-styling doll my sister got for Christmas; after that, it was the porcelain dolls in my mom’s dresser that kept staring at me.”

Lutes 

“For much of my childhood, at night, I was terrified that Rascar Kapac would climb through my bedroom window and throw a crystal ball at me—even though I lived on the 9th floor of a massive high-rise.”

RCF1

 “Ghosts, the Invisible.”

Nassyo

"The scene in The Amityville (1979) where the character goes down to the basement and sees himself as a devil behind a wall... As a kid, when I lived with my parents in the 13th arrondissement, I had to take out the trash to the storage room on the -1 level... Panicked, I’d hug the walls, toss the bag in, and run as fast as I could back to the elevator as soon as the lights went out."

Jok

“When I was little, I was terrified of the chickens that chased me around my grandparents’ house. They were like dinosaurs of our time.”

Crapule

 “A nightmare I had when I was little: I’m at home, and there’s the shadow of a wolf on the stairs, coming up as a storm rages with lightning.”

Kid F 

 “My brother had left a Chucky VHS tape in the VCR… that’s one of my childhood traumas.”

9.10DO 

 “The deep waters.”

Hermes

“The crocodiles hiding under the bed”

Better to have long hair than short-sighted 

To you, a woman indulging in the solitary pleasures of the flesh seems as commonplace as putting whipped cream on strawberries—sure, but in the 15th century, life wasn’t cool; pleasuring oneself was considered a perversion, a physical and mental disorder. Long before you could get off to 4K POVs on Bellesa.com, the church in your village viewed female masturbation as witchcraft, a sort of demonic gang-bang organized by Satan, bathing in a river of pussy juice. Guided by the gentle voice of God, the blessed asses in Birkenstock sandals could then humiliate, torture, and sacrifice these infamous beings, temptresses of evil and responsible for all the world’s ills. 

Good Lord, we still wonder what Eve was up to when she was sucking on her apple compote with frail Adam, that even today Man seeks to bury you under a pile of logs and reduce you to ashes.Among the witches devoured by fire, you can, of course—gentlemen—go fry your balls in hell before having them sliced off with a mandoline. Reading the books of Mona Chollet and Angela Davis while ironing your underwear won’t save you from the spells the creatures with loose hair have in store for you, with poisoned kisses and squirts in your holy water fonts.

Bonus References:
Film: The Devils by Ken Russel, Benedetta by Paul Verhoeven, Saint Maud by Rose Glass
Les sorcières d'Akelarre by Pablo Agüero
Book: Sorcière, la puissance invaincue des femmes by Mona Chollet, Blues et féminisme by Angela Davis
Music: I'd Rather Be Burned As A Witch  by Eartha Kitt

 Apocalypse (@lebruitetlodeur), the strigoi from the 93,  arranged to meet me in La Courneuve (a northern suburb of Paris), on Rue des Usines Babcock Wilcox, on November 19, 2020. The entrance is located across from the Banque de France, near the ring road. Inside, a few people have already come to explore the place and paint. I thought the spot was untouched, but it’s practically been deflowered. The group decides to venture into the other rooms of the factory, but the only access is via the rooftops. My rolling tote bag doesn’t let me play Indiana Jones; I scout the area to find a spot at ground level. 

Apocalypse begins his piece in a dark room. I prefer the outdoors and choose this red-brick wall, typical of the industrial architecture built in the early 20th century. A security guard pokes his head in, alerted by an alarm. After a brief exchange, the flexibility of his professional rigor allows us to continue our project undisturbed. 

Part of the dilapidated building appears to be home to a Romani family, who have made it their dwelling while they wait to be evicted—a daily struggle for this community, one of the most marginalized in French society. To the right of the wall I’m starting to paint with a roller, the children play while the women prepare the fire for cooking. Intrigued by my presence, one of the girls in the group, with purple nails, approaches and asks me about the meaning of my painting. Other family members join us; a conversation ensues, with some of the nuances lost in translation. As I explain what this finger-like shape might represent, I mention the idea of a “witch.” The woman who appears to be the matriarch gives me the Romanian translation of the word: vrăjitoare. 

With the perfect tagline in mind, I pull out my film camera and ask Cassandra to pose. Once back home, I dive into some research on Romanian witches and discover the series Vrăjitoare, an incredible photographic work by Lucia Sekerková exploring the contemporary world of these Romani fortune-tellers in the land of Vlad the Impaler.

Bonus references:
Photographer: Lucia Sekerková
Film: Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola, Morse by Thomas Alfredson

 Isabelle has blue eyes 

When I was little, deep in the dark countryside, there were two neighbors who lived together in the house right next door. These strange ladies were actually two sisters, and they scared the hell out of me. I was afraid to walk past their house. In my hazy memory, they perfectly matched the image of old witches straight out of cartoons: clogs on their feet and scarves on their heads. 

When I think of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen in the movies, three instantly come to mind: in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Béatrice Dalle, an actress-turned-witch, plays a cannibal who, after seducing one of her prey, ends up devouring her victim in the middle of sex coitus. 

The second is from Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), starring Isabelle Adjani. Walking down the sticky corridor of the Berlin subway, Anna—a shopping bag in hand, her gaze vacant—falls into a demonic trance, her body writhing like an eel. On her knees, mouth open, eyes wide, a red and white liquid flows from her mouth and between her legs. I first discovered this sequence during a late-night viewing on my TV before falling asleep, and upon waking, I was convinced it was a figment of my drowsy mind. The next morning, I popped the VHS tape back into my VCR to discover that this traumatic scene, filled with bodily fluids and screams, was indeed in the movie and not the product of some fucking nightmare. 

Finally, the third shock comes from the Japanese Sadako Yamamura, the ghostly woman crawling out of a well to emerge from the television at the end of Hideo Nakata’s Ring.These three scenes depict female characters: Damn it, I really need to make an appointment with a psychoanalyst... 

“I don't have earlobes. Neither does my girlfriend, Asia Argento. There were actually women who were burned at the stake for that in the Middle Ages. We are the granddaughters of the witches who weren't burned.” Béatrice Dalle

Bonus references
Film: Trouble Every Day by Claire Denis, Possession by Andrej Zulawski, Ring by Hideo Nakata, Born in Flames by Lizzee Borden
Music: Open Titles (Trouble Every Day) by Tindersticks

Infamous

In 2001, my buddy Ypsos and I headed to the video store we’d painted to rent Takeshi Kitano’s Aniki, My Brother and a strange film called Ring by Hideo Nakata.

Those images from another continent seriously messed with my sleep without warning. J-Horror and its Japanese ghosts (yūrei) really stirred things up, effectively burying the neo-slasher films spawned by Scream that were swarming on the other side of the Atlantic at the time.

If the creatures I draw hide their faces under cascades of hair, it’s partly because of—or thanks to—Sadako Yamamura and her sticky strands glued to her dishwater-colored face. A figure that’s half-ghost, half-corpse, pulled from a well, she’d make any boogeyman look away, haunt Freddy Krueger’s nightmares, and make Chucky piss his overalls.

Sunday, May 2, 2021, 8 a.m., Rue Saint Bernard, Zone 11. I start a street performance I’d spotted the day before, inspired by the Japanese tradition of “onryō.” 8:30 a.m., just as I’m getting started, a guy approaches me politely and asks what I’m going to do. He introduces himself as an ’80s rapper named Iron Zéro (formerly Mc Iron2) and drops a few names of old-school hip-hop legends, including his friends the TCG. I tell him that fifteen years ago, I got my hands on a huge collection of MP3 files by the rapper-tagger Sheek, a member of one of the first French crews. The double-page spread in Vincent Piolet’s book Regarde ta jeunesse dans les yeux comes to mind: Iron2 and Shooz and their performance at the Globo in 1987.

As we chat on the sidewalk, I struggle to finish this painting, glancing left and right. This weirdo—who looks like he stepped right out of a vortex that only Paris can conjure up on a Sunday morning—makes me listen to his music blaring from a speaker while I sketch the outlines of this hairy figure. I finish the awning with an Art Brut dedication and capture Iron in a photo striking a confident B-Boy pose. Just like Sadako’s victims in Ring, Iron is one of those fifty-something MCs whose face was slightly blurred in the family photo from the early days of the hip-hop movement in France.  

We walk a few blocks together and i continue this fascinating conversation—which could have gone on for hours—with this pioneer, one of those sturdy pillars who keeps going in the underground scene out of sheer passion.

“The tastiest mushrooms grow where the light doesn't shine.”

Bonus references:
Film: Ring, Dark Water by Hideo Nakata, Kairo by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ju-On by Takashi Shimizu, Hiruko The Goblin by Shinya Tsukamoto
Exposition:  Enfers et fantôme d'Asie -  Musée du Quai Branly (2018)
Book: Fantômes du cinéma japonais by Stéphane du Mesnildot
Painting: Yūrei by Sawaki Sūshi (1737)

Outrage 

In his films, Takeshi Kitano explores the relationships between criminals, loyalty, and honor. What is fascinating about this great director is his treatment of violence, his poetry of brutality—introspective, tinged with dark humor, and often absurd. 

It was in the small UGC theater in Châtelet-Les-Halles (center place in Paris)—the one in the basement, which was showing genre films at the time—that I first discovered him as an actor in Battle Royale in 2000. Takeshi as a gym teacher, decked out in a tracksuit, explaining to his high school students that they’re going to have to kill each other on a deserted island until only one remains. To assert his authority over the recalcitrant students, he doesn’t hesitate to throw a knife right in the face of a sassy student. That’s the beauty of the characters he plays—with that disarming nonchalance, he’ll shoot you in the face and follow it up with a kick to the back, a vanilla ice cream in one hand, a cigarette in the other, half his face paralyzed. 

 In 2010, I rushed to the “Gosse de peintre Beat Takeshi Kitano” exhibition at the Fondation Cartier to be blown away by a body of visual works by this multifaceted master. To move on to the next film, let’s stay on the same continent with another master of Asian cinema. Just as Kitano did with his Japanese yakuza, no one has portrayed the Hong Kong triads with as much style and violence as John Woo. Put on your iron hood before turning the page—you might get hit by a stray bullet. 

“I want to hold on to my childlike sensitivity forever. No matter how mature or accomplished I become, I want to remain true to myself and to my own truth.” 

Takeshi Kitano

Bonus references:
Film: Battle Royale by Kinji Fukasaku, Violent Cop, Sonatine, Hana-bi by Takeshi Kitano
Exposition: Gosse de peintre Beat Takeshi Kitano - Fondation Cartier (2008)
Book: Takeshi Kitano Hors Catégorie by Lucas Aubry

Back in the ’90s, when I was in middle school, I’d hop on my bike and swing by to see the late Marcel, a local character, to borrow some Jean-Claude Van Damme VHS tapes—it was like our own private video club. One Wednesday afternoon, I stopped by for my weekly rental. With his prison-style tattoos, Marcel pulled out two movies tucked next to a few porn films discreetly stashed at the back of a shelf: Hard Boiled and John Woo’s The Killer. As far back as I can remember, that was my first encounter with Asian action cinema.

Accustomed to 80s and 90s American films starring Sylvester, Arnold, Jean-Claude, Bruce, Steven, Wesley and the like, I remember being blown away when I saw the opening scene of Hard Boiled in the tea house, with the great Chow Yun Fat (Tequila) playing a rogue cop in the heart of Hong Kong—a city of crime, toothpick in mouth, taking on the underworld.

That exhilarating opening sequence left me feeling like I was being choked by the collar, unable to catch my breath for a single second amid all those body counts. Just like Nicky Larson staring at a pair of hot chicks, glued to the screen, my childhood buddy and I were bleeding from the nose during those endless gunfights. Under a hail of smoking shell casings, the victims keep coming, the Beretta magazines never running dry, offering a ballet of bodies being hurled about with incredibly choreographed violence.

That’s when I discovered the aesthetic of Hong Kong action films—their dual-pistol shootouts and poetic slow-motion sequences that suddenly put American action scenes to shame. Compared to these HK productions, Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal look like pool flippers. A huge fan of John Woo—and especially of himself—Vandamme, having become a star on the other side of the Atlantic, kicked open the studio doors with a roundhouse kick to the Chinese director to shoot Hard Target with the tagline “Don’t Hunt What You Can’t Kill.”

As I proofread this text for the 1,624th time, simply watching his movies in the theater is enough to bring peace back to the church: thirty years later, they’re burying John Wick with a silenced bullet right between the eyes.

In the land of the gold rush, Hollywood is divided into two categories: producers with loaded guns, and directors who dig…

I’m pouring a little tequila on the floor for you, Marcel, and I apologize posthumously for falling asleep while watching the original VHS of Double Impact.

"When I'm directing, I feel like I'm painting a picture or writing a poem. Every shot in an action scene should look like a work of art." John Woo

Bonus references:
Film: A better tomorrow (trilogy) by John Woo & Tsui Hark, Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet in the head by John Woo, Police Story 3 by Stanley Tong, City of Crime by Ringo Lam
Mook: John Woo: Comme dans un film de John Woo - Capture Mag
Music: Quelques gouttes suffisent  (Album) by Ärsenik, Striving for perfection by Reakwon

"Nothing and no one can stifle a revolt. 

You sowed the seeds of hatred, so now you reap what you sow..." 

2 Bal Niggets & Mystik - La Sédition, 1997 

The white-collar mafia dictates the rules of conduct, sitting comfortably in fine restaurants, where one can toast, shake hands, and burn through cash without a care in the world. Paris may well go up in flames along the grand Haussmannian avenues, but nothing will affect the waltz of the powerful; the Élysée acts with an iron fist while its guards, armed with GLI F4s, charge through the smoke of tear gas and charred sports cars. In 2020, the Covid crisis takes it upon itself to sweep the last embers from the cobblestones of the posh neighborhoods, giving Fouquet’s insurance time to handle the paperwork. As for the tourists, they’ll only come back to mingle with the rabble once the people have been tamed and the health pass has been stamped.

Bonus references:
Film: Paris is burning by Jennie Livingston
Music: Qu'est ce qu'on attends? by NTM, Ici et maintenant by Puzzle

Only cream pays

Just as I’m about to finish painting this double awning, which I started early in the morning, the owner comes out of the store, having heard the clanging of metal with every stroke of my brush. He asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m repainting over the graffiti. He tells me he’s had his storefront cleaned up before and asks if I work for the city. I tell him I’m a private contractor: “I’m going to cover your entire awning with this color,” all while continuing to coat the slats from left to right with a turquoise shade that’s a far cry from mouse gray, matching the one used by the city of Paris. 

The guy doesn’t look convinced; he doesn’t know what to say. I can tell his brain is short-circuiting: he takes off and tells me he wants to contact the local municipality. His departure leaves me with several options. For the first, completely fictional one, I think of my friend Kegrea who, armed with an alarm gun, would have fired into the air to make him bolt like a rabbit—which, in the 11th arrondissement, could be misinterpreted. Option 2: finish my work and get out of there before things get messy. Option 3, the safest: get the hell out of there right away and finish up the next morning in peace, followed by a quick coffee on a terrace. 

Originally, the tagline was supposed to be “City on Fire” to echo the fiery protests of the “Yellow Vests” movement and reference Ringo Lam’s 1987 film starring Chow Yun Fat—from which Tarantino borrowed a few shots for his Reservoir Dogs (1990). Unsettled by this unexpected connection, I replaced “fire” with “crime.” I have no memory of that other gangster film released in 1997, in which Lucy Liu plays a stripper—the same actress who, in Kill Bill, portrays a fearsome assassin and ultimately has the top of her skull sliced off, a role inspired by Japanese actress Meiko Kaji in the 1970s films Lady Snowblood and Lady Scorpion.

Bonus reference:
Film: City on Fire by Ringo Lam, Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarentino
Music: Flower of Carnage by Meiko Kaji

Doggy style

April 12, 2023, Rue de Montreuil: there’s nothing better than kicking off the day’s festivities at the former storefront of the LGBT+ Youth Club to welcome a new transformation. With just a few minutes left, as I was drawing the lines, a woman dragging her grocery bag stopped to ask me if I gave private lessons. She told me she wanted to get into “street art” but didn’t know how to start. 

She pulled out her phone to show me her work: beautiful little dogs with scarves made of papier-mâché. She’d like to customize them. I advise her to buy markers at the art store and suggest she watch tutorials on YouTube. I apologize for not giving her my full attention because I’m in a bit of a hurry—I have some pussy hair details to finish up. 
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Japanese actress and singer Meiko Kaji played two major roles in 1970s cinema that have become iconic symbols of rebellion. In the Lady Scorpion saga, she is betrayed by her boyfriend, a rotten, overzealous cop, then sent to jail, where she endures humiliation and physical abuse before managing to escape the quagmire. 

Sword in hand, her face hidden by a wide-brimmed hat from which long black hair flows, the venomous Sasori isn’t there to chat but to shut a few mouths. Driven by a single obsession: to take down the scum who betrayed her and to rip the balls off a corrupt, macho regime. With the icy caution of a hunter, the scorpion doesn’t strike without reason; she tracks only what she’s ready to kill.

Bonus reference
Film: Lady Scorpion 1 & 2 by Shun'ya itô, Lady Snowblood by Toshiya Fujita
Music: Une lame dans ma veste by Casey

Free the beast! 

In 1993, I saw Jurassic Park and Les Visiteurs in theaters. That same year, John Woo’s Hard Target came out, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, where a bunch of rich jerks have fun hunting down homeless people in New Orleans, promising them a big chunk of cash if they can dodge the bullets. 

With his long neck and curls blowing in the wind, Chance Boudreaux is no pushover—he’s a hobo-thug, shooting guns while standing on a motorcycle and punching a rattlesnake before biting off its tail. In the early ’90s, Jean-Claude, with his slicked-back hair, is at the top of the podium; he does whatever he wants with his mullet and drives all the technicians on set crazy with his winks and slow-motion smiles. We’re a long way from the start of his career with his buddy from Brussels: Mohamed Qissi aka Tong Po, (the most Moroccan of the Thais), in Beat Street ’84.

Right after Karate Tiger, he donned the first bodysuit of the greatest hunter in fantasy cinema on the set of Predator in 1987, but by trying to do the splits every two minutes between two trees, he got kicked off the set, making way for Kevin Peter Hall. 

I had jotted down in my notebook the tagline “Don’t Hunt What You Can’t Kill,” taken from the movie poster. It seemed fitting for this kind of monstrous painting, like a mutant beast being hunted through the urban jungle of Paris. 

At the same time, I had the film La Traque (Hunting, 1975) in my bag—a rape-and-revenge social drama where a gang of hunters assault a foreign woman before tracking her through the French countryside. Just like Yves Boisset’s Dupont Lajoie, these kinds of films dared to expose the hypocrisy and human brutality of 1970s France—a land of hospitality, stinky cheese, and stranger people hunts. 

2021. Around 7:30 a.m., on my way back from a solitary stroll, the two degrees on the outdoor thermometer are hitting me right in the face. With gloved hands gripping the handlebars, I catch a glimpse of four “stickers” busily scrawling a feminist message—fragmented into several A4 sheets—on a wall on a side street off Oberkampf. 

After trading some pastries for a contactless payment at the bakery, I wrap up my morning stroll with one last act of graffiti on an another street. I tackle this small metal roll-up door under the skeptical gaze of the mechanics across the street. The Polish poster for Yves Boisset’s film Dupont Lajoie seems to have left a mark on my subconscious, permeating some of my compositions. 

Released in 1975, this film is perhaps the most significant ever made on the theme of everyday racism in France. It tells the story of a narrow-minded Parisian café owner on summer vacation at the same campground in the South. After a few drinks, the vacationer rapes and kills his friend’s daughter (Isabelle Huppert) in the dunes, then manipulates the situation by accusing an immigrant worker toiling on the construction site next door. The prevailing xenophobia drives all the pale-faced guys in tank tops and flip-flops to lynch the poor, innocent country bumpkin. Inspector Boulard, the cop in charge of the case, plays the Serpico but ends up covering up the case in exchange for a promotion. Case closed. At the campground, everyone can keep having a blast dancing the conga. 

On April 9, 2022, during a visit to Rennes, where I had been invited by Solek to paint, I spotted the DVD of Dupont Lajoie on display at a market stall in the city center, which I hurried to buy. A few days later, the extreme right made it to the second round of the presidential election... 

“Censors are perverts who see things that aren't there”. Yves Boisset (1939–2025) 

Only dead fish go with the flow

Sidney Lumet, a low-key American director who prefers the glow of New York streetlights to the Hollywood spotlight, has more than forty films to his credit, many of which are masterpieces: 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, Running on empty… Yet he has had few commercial successes. The reason may lie in how he handles his subjects. When a filmmaker ventures into the inner workings of American democracy—police, justice, politics, media—by turning his characters into antiheroes, the general public often has a hard time swallowing it. Based on a true story, Serpico portrays a cop played by Al Pacino who finds himself entangled in the corruption plaguing the NYPD. An irreproachable and righteous officer, but at odds with his superiors. With a thick hippie beard and preferring a bucket hat to a police cap, he finds himself in trouble after refusing bribes and other shady deals from his colleagues. An outsider convinced he can turn the tide in a system rotten to the core. When staying honest costs you your sanity. 

“While the purpose of all films is to entertain, the kind of cinema I believe in goes a step further. It encourages the viewer to examine one aspect or another of their own consciousness.” Sidney Lumet 

Blue Bandana
 

In 1980, William Friedkin released Cruising, a dark crime thriller about a serial killer on the loose in the streets of Manhattan, targeting men who love men. Al Pacino plays a straight-laced cop, in a relationship with his girlfriend, who is forced to go undercover in the gay underground to investigate. The catch is that after hanging out in sleazy bars where people rub up against each other, Pacino, aka Steve Burns, starts to seriously sweat the small stuff, no longer sure if he still prefers licking peaches or sucking eggplants. It is in this point that the film’s strength lies: anointing the viewer with a slippery ambiguity.

Friedkin is a cinematic rebel who, at that time, was one of the few who preferred to piss in the corners of American cinema rather than try to smooth them over. 

In 1979, Pacino was 39 years old; he had become famous thanks to the success of The Godfather trilogy (featuring a Marlon Brando transformed by makeup artist Dick Smith) and Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. So, to avoid tarnishing his image, the actor disowned Cruising, choosing to keep his balls tucked away rather than put them on the table, so as not to stain his career with a few white streaks.


 

In the early 1980s, in his performance Pissed-off, when visual artist David Hammons urinated on a wall in Harlem—more specifically, on a sculpture by another artist that had been imposed on the urban landscape—it was a way of splashing down on the art world: white, bourgeois, and closed-off. 

"The art audience is the worst audience in the world.They’re overeducated; they’re there to criticize, not to understand, and they never have fun.Why should I waste my time making things for that audience? I refuse to address them, and I’ll play with the audience on the street.” David Hammons 

Fleujellation 

Dick Smith was the godfather of American special effects makeup, a creator of cinematic monsters from the 1950s through the 1990s. He was the kind of grandpa you would have loved to have, whose workshop was filled with latex creatures, severed leg stumps, acetone-reeking brushes, and dried fake blood. 

Before becoming the mentor to many makeup artists who defined the golden age of special effects in the ’80s—including the famous Rob Bottin—a makeup artist slightly older than Dick Smith was overshadowed by Hollywood studios. Creator of the bodysuit for the amphibious humanoid in The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954, Milicent Patrick was ousted from history by a jealous director who took all the credit for the work. A classic industry scenario where ego is as destructive as that of an Italian gangster. 
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Created in 2009, this black-and-white portrait is based on a scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Reagan is possessed by a demon that makes you want to puke in your face while mocking you, pissing on your carpet, insulting your mother in Latin, and jerking off with a crucifix. Straight out of the crack hill of Paris, we owe her decomposing face and greasy hair to Dick Smith. Believe it or not, but when the black paint dried, an upside-down cross appeared. I heard a voice saying, “Stick your cock up her ass... you motherfuckingworthless cocksucker.” 

 I ran to the nearest church to get holy water to throw on the wall.
 

"Lord, do not forgive me, for I know what I am doing."
  

“The scariest things in movies are humans, not monsters.” Guillermo Del Toro 

“Creatures, monsters, cyborgs, and mutants remind us that being human means always being prone to fail”. Thierry Hoquet

 The hill has (crossed) eyes

Although this little joint (which no longer exists as such) went by the name Le Cosmopolis in 2021, it wasn’t the kind of trendy spot that would welcome little Ewoks of every color and serve matcha lattes; rather, it was the kind of place that housed the neighborhood’s old-timers, whose complexions matched the cigarette-stained wallpaper. Its name does, however, make me want to mention the fictional bar The Last Resort from the movie Total Recall (1990). 

Heading to Mars, colonized by a billionaire (hi! Elon Musk) who keeps the population under a glass dome and seeks to kill Kuato, leader of the oppressed on the Red Planet, where you’ll find Tesla taxi cars driven by robots. Quaid, the main character played by Schwarzenegger, shows up at this multicultural club in Venus City, accompanied by that bastard Benny (a mutant, but mostly a big snitch), to meet up with Melina, leader of the resistance alongside Kuato. My vision of a neighborhood bar, in short. 

In this gallery of radiation-damaged characters, there’s the three-titted prostitute and that guy with a shnekzer face, creations of Rob Bottin, the mad makeup artist behind Carpenter’s The Thing. Speaking of mutants, let’s jump back to 2014 in Nevers City (little town in the middle of France), where I painted this trimammophilia piece under a railway bridge. To reach it, I had done a first scouting run by following the track along a dirt path on my Goonies BMX. 

The slope actually led to a hidden gypsy camp. When I got to the top and spotted the caravans, I decided to turn around. But barely had I started back when I saw, coming straight at me, a van racing home at full speed. Ah my friend… this was starting to smell like deep trouble. The heap of scrap skids to a halt across the path, cutting me off completely. Four yéniches jump out and surround me. One of them, hot as a chestnut, asks:
 “What are you doing here, my friend?” Cool as you like, I tell him I came to check out the tags under the bridge. That convoluted answer seems to bounce right off the bare chest, his face slashed from top to bottom like he walked straight out of a Wes Craven movie. 

Glittering like a thousand suns, my two-finger gold ring catches their attention like magpies. 

The situation lasts about four minutes. And believe me: four minutes with your head stuck between two train doors will always feel longer than four minutes with your head stuck between Sydney Sweeney’s boobies. Two options begin to take shape. 

The first: the other guy, with his Martian face and facial tics, pulls a blade and I ride away with two fewer knuckles and one less bike. The second, more comfortable option: I quietly slip out of the situation without bodily harm. Option two it is. Sometimes the sun really does shine on a dog’s ass. After that alien tells me, “Don’t come back here. This is our place, my friend.” I roll out like a prince, all my limbs still attached, like a white cholo cruising my lowrider discount. 

Still determined to bomb that bridge, I go back a few days later, at night, with a few beers in my backpack just in case—to soften up those creatures if they happened to show up while I was painting. Nevers and its last resort bars, packed with brawls between gypsies, carnival folk, neighborhood guys, and rugby players. 

The "diagonal of emptiness"—always a great atmosphere, and always great times...

Se7en (1995), a black diamond of the urban thriller. John Doe, the serial killer, bases his atrocities on the seven deadly sins. Brad Pitt, the young wild dog, and the man who never ages—Morgan Freeman—play the two cops assigned to investigate in a city where it rains as much as in Paris in August.

In the collector’s DVD released in the early 2000s, there were a bunch of bonus features in which Rob Bottin talks about the creation of the makeup for the character tied to the sin of "sloth". When the cops enter the room, where hundreds of pine-tree air fresheners hang to mask what must be an unbearable smell, they discover a cadaverous man still alive, strapped to a mattress as greasy as a rougail sausage dish.

Next to the bed, Polaroids show the victim’s slow physical decay—the degeneration of a body tied up and kept alive for a year by the drugs the killer meticulously administers. In the DVD you can see the different photographs illustrating each stage of the makeup, with commentary by Rob Bottin. One of those shots served as the reference for this painting I made in 2009 in an abandoned factory in Bourges city.

“To represent violence is to show what power does to bodies.” Pier Paolo Pasolini

At the turning point of a new era in cinema, with AI now entering the industry—and long before digital effects—the bosses of SFX makeup were named Rick Baker, Stan Winston, and Rob Bottin, to name just the most famous ones of the ’80s and ’90s. 

The one whose work I wanted to shine a flashlight on designed RoboCop’s suit and the mutants of Total Recall, including that incredible mechanical head opening where the hero is hidden. After thirty years of career, Rob Bottin disappeared from the radar in the early 2000s. They say he’d had enough of the infernal Hollywood machine, the kind that grinds the assholes of honest and talented artists into pure pulp. To keep it short, here’s an anecdote about this work-obsessed man. 

On the set of The Howling (1987), Bottin spends days sculpting a werewolf head. His buddy tells him: 

— “Whoa, that head is insane, bro. You killed it, Robbie!”
 Bottin answers:
— “No. It’s shit.” 

And he throws it in the air. 

His friend, stunned:
 — “Are you crazy? Why the hell did you do that?” 

— “Because I can do ten times better,” Bottin replies. 

He sculpts a second head. His friend practically gets a nosebleed and admits it’s indeed way meaner than the first one. Rob grabs it and destroys it again. 

“It can still be better.” 

Third version. And this time the verdict is undeniable—it crushes the previous one a hundred times over. 

I’ll let you meditate on the moral of that story. 

Maybe Bottin ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and extreme exhaustion after the shoot of The Thing in 1982. But at 22 years old, he created one of the most terrifying organic creatures ever designed to this day. 

I chose this storefront on Rue de la Pierre Levée, because it sits right across from a school where students are learned special effects makeup. 

“I didn’t want it to remind anyone of a monster they had already seen…
You could do anything: all you had to do was imagine something and build it.” Rob Bottin on The Thing

The Thing, the ultimate monster movie, never equaled: Carpenter’s direction, Ennio Morricone’s score, the special effects, the set design, the lighting… Thinking it would crush the game in 1982, the thing crashed at the box office against Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. 

In the early eighties, the American audience needed to be stroked the right way—they preferred sobbing over a plush alien that looks like a turd rather than sweating in front of a shapeless mutant thing trying to fuck civilization. 

Despised yesterday by the same people who bow to it today, it took a few decades to give Carpenter what belongs to Carpenter. 

Two years later came his tenth film: Starman, alongside other massive classics like Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The NeverEnding Story, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Terminator. 

1984. A special year… 

 No fate but what we make

The ethics of the good now seems to be replacing the ethics of the true. 

When opposing radicalities hook up in a hysterical embrace, an electric arc bursts out. From this furious, bodily fusion flows a nauseating liquid: fear. Out of that mud a Terminator is born: Sensitivity Readers, platform moral charters, Instagram algorithms, militant purities of every stripe. A moral cyborg, programmed to eliminate the recalcitrant — those who didn’t sign the artistic code of good conduct. 

In this war, Kyle Reese is supposed to protect Sarah Connor. 

Kyle Reese is the producer, the editor, the gallerist, the institution, the distributor. 

Sarah Connor is the artist — the one carrying the resistance in her womb: art, imagination, fiction, free creation. 

But in 2026, Kyle Reese is pissing himself. He’s turned into a spineless coward terrified of Skynet: public opinion, social media, media firestorms, digital courts. 

So he abandons Sarah Connor. She has to fend for herself with her backup weapons — a pencil, a paintbrush, a camera, a microphone. 

She fights to keep creating in an ecosystem that is mutating and smoothing everything in its path: uberization, permanent competitiveness, moral puritanism, artificial intelligence, deregulated cultural capitalism. 

Some think they’re inventing the revolution. Others convince themselves they’ve already made it — and now spend their time making sure it never starts again. 

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” George Orwell, author of 1984 

“The plot of Terminator, just like the one in Matrix, feels totally plausible to me.

One day someone’s gonna screw up with the button and lose control.

By the time you finish doing a division, an AI could divide the population by two.

They won’t hesitate for a single second — and they won’t miss us.”

Venom, producer, DJ and founder of the label Marvel Records.

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“A culture that no longer resists becomes an instrument of domination.”

Interview

VENOM - Producer, DJ, ex-MC and founder of the Marvel Records label.

Back in 2009. I’m hanging around Movies 2000 in the 9th, that underground cinema spot, walls covered in posters and grimey magazines. I’m chopping it up with the guy behind the counter about horror flicks and rap. Outta nowhere, he slides me a number across the desk — one of the Marvel Records dudes.
On the phone, I get introduced to MC Zombi. We set up a meet in a kebab joint. Venom — MC and producer — just dropped Un justicier dans la ville, a hip-hop record where boom bap crashes into fantasy VHS samples. He wants a video that hits as hard as the sound. The very first clip off the album.
I’m working as a makeup artist back then, so I offer my skills to handle the special effects. The voice of the Vigilante is done by Rurik Sallé, former Mad Movies writer. I bring in a squad of extras, all hungry enough to survive a freezing night shoot in a wasteland that’s now the Paris courthouse. After that, it just flows — we co-direct Mad Musiques and the next videos for the label.
No money, but plenty of ideas and hustle. We build an aesthetic straight out of our shared obsessions. Fifteen years later, still connected through our projects (videos, photos, exhibitions…), this first issue of Ephemera gives us a chance to sit down for a deep, reference-heavy conversation.
Are you ready? Press play.

1. August 2023—as I write these lines, I’ve just learned of the death of director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection, The Sorcerer, Cruising, Bug, To Live and Die in L.A...), and I know he’s just as much of an icon to you as he is to me. He’s the kind of artist who stuck his finger into the dysfunctions of his country by scratching beneath the surface—it was typical of ’70s films, the ones that dared to tackle thorny subjects without beating around the bush. What scenes, images, or sounds from his filmography come to mind? Have they influenced your musical world in any way?

A director with balls! I’d put him in the same league as De Palma, Cronenberg, Verhoeven, and Boisset. Like them, he’s had a definite influence on my mind. The unfiltered, unvarnished message. Scenes you see once and never forget. Friedkin is The Exorcist, plain and simple!

But the image that stuck with me the most is still the incredible ending of To Live and Die in L.A.—you expect anything but that. The guy in the bomber jacket is one of the most naturally evil henchmen I’ve ever seen. Zero morals. Friedkin’s cinematic integrity got a guy out of prison. Respect for his work, rest in peace.

2. What memories do you have of video rental stores?

The same ones as tons of kids from the ’80s. Rows of covers, each one more eye-catching than the last: Warner Bros., CBS/FOX, CIC, Paramount, VCR, Scherzo, Hollywood Video, and the Van Damme movies from Delta Video.

VHS tapes gave me a taste for thrills; they blew my mind. The horror movies that repelled and drew you in at the same time, with Melki’s artwork or the René Château tapes (may he rest in peace)—“the movies you’ll never see on TV”—like Maniac or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the Bruce Lee films. And, of course, the restricted 18+ sections where you’d sneak in to watch the Marc Dorcel tapes… The image of a girl in the hay with a lollipop really stuck with me! My dad came home one night with Beetlejuice and Moonwalker, both with fake age ratings on the covers—I’ll never forget that moment.

3. What images or sounds scared the hell out of you when you were a kid?

I’d say it was more of a shock than fear. Here are a few that left a mark on my young soul: Murphy’s execution in Robocop, the spiders in The Beyond, Emile in the acid in Robocop (again). The dogs scaring by the creature in The Thing, the hand fused to the gun by flesh in Videodrome, the rape and murder of the girl in Death Wish 2, the beach scene at the beginning of Maniac, the flash on the demon’s face in The Exorcist, the pastor in Poltergeist II…

4 - Director James Cameron recently said in an interview that he warned us back in 1984 with his film The Terminator about the potential dangers of AI in weaponry. The line between reality and fiction has blurred; human-looking cyborgs will be part of our daily lives in the near future, and Elon Musk’s latest videos are straight out of a sci-fi movie. Since Terminator is one of your major influences, is a dystopian vision of humanity more appealing to imagine from an artistic perspective?

More appealing? I’d say no. More unsettling? Yes. These films (Terminator, Westworld, Saturn 3, etc.) have inevitably influenced my view of the relationship between humans and machines, but my gut reaction is like the sound of Ecto-1 when I see technological advancements. My friend Azaïa sent me videos of armed robots hitting the bullseye—they don’t aim; they calculate. It’s relentless.

The plot of Terminator, just like that of The Matrix, seems so plausible to me. One day, someone’s going to mess up the button and lose control.
In the time it takes you to do a division, an AI could wipe out half the population! They won’t hesitate for a second, and they won’t miss us.
The end of humanity, as bleak as it may be, seems inevitable to me. While we wait for it to arrive, we have the luxury of fantasizing about it and making movies to put a screen between our eyes and the inevitable, while other parts of the world are already experiencing it—without robots.
I have hope; I have kids, but I’m terrified for their descendants, the ones who will have to fight the water war.

5- In our paranoid society, art is a target and is regularly attacked; the mainstream devours the landscape like Stephen King’s Langoliers. Some subjects are as scorching as the sun is for fucking vampires—the rays can pierce you from all sides. As an independent artist, do you impose limits on yourself? Have you made compromises in your artistic journey?

Your perspective is your focus; it’s shaped by your sensitivity to light.
What you believe in, the principles you follow. I’d rather burn in the fire of anonymity than be corrupted by slimy complacency. I don’t want to depend on art to eat, so I won’t be devoured. Thanks for mentioning The Langoliers, which I love, with the guy who plays Serge in Beverly Hills Cop, aka “an espresso!”

6- This raises the question of artistic legitimacy—of what we create in relation to who we are. Do we necessarily have to have lived in hell to know how to paint flames?

I think we don’t give a damn about the rules. Legitimacy was invented by gatekeepers and people who are scared of competition. Who can explain inspiration? Why do perfectly well-adjusted people paint super intense stuff? Why do kids with no social issues do the trashiest things possible? The mind isn’t a barcode—why try to scan it? If you think we bathe in lava in paradise, that’s your right.

 7- What role does an (audiovisual) artist play in these anxiety-inducing times when fear has taken hold of people’s minds?

A role that comes with responsibility when you have influence over young people. If you have a voice, you’d better have something to say. Above all, don’t hold back. Protest is getting lost in the mainstream—it’s missing. Gambino and Kendrick Lamar are living proof that you can be in vogue and still punch the establishment in the face.

8-  At the beginning of your track Le Blues du Justicier (2009), there’s this fictional conversation where your character—the one you play—is accused by journalists of being “subversive” and “inciting violence.” Is subversion in art about not stroking any weasel’s fur in the right direction? About being a fucking Hellraiser in a world that forces you to pick a side?

That’s exactly it—if you’re too outspoken in your message, if you make people uncomfortable, they’ll try to discredit you by labeling you. Damn, is Prince in his underwear on stage singing Annie Christian subversive? Nah, man, it’s the message that goes straight to your brain without any detours.

9- Paul Verhoeven has been regularly attacked for his films; he was called a fascist for his movie *Starship Troopers* (1997). Do you think about potential attacks or criticism when writing lyrics or composing an album, or does it just roll off your back?

The military in that movie is fascist. Absolutely! Starship Troopers paints a vivid picture of the social hierarchy. The skymarshals who have a change of heart and resign after sending kids to die for nothing. The elite who have time to flirt during flight lessons while the working-class kids on the ground only have time to have sex during a break before returning to a mega-uncertain future.
To answer your question, when I was writing, I didn’t care how it would be received. My vocal album Un Justicier Dans La Ville was already pretty out there—I knew it wouldn’t please everyone, even before I’d finished it.

10- Our emotional reaction to a social issue can be a trigger for creation. That’s personally the case for me. If our job is to make blood sausage out of the blood of current events, what was your last gut reaction? The one that pushed you to pick up your gear?

Honestly, never any. I don’t make music to rebel against society. That would be overestimating my abilities. I release albums to exorcise my demons and stay alive, to feel the rush. My observations of existence and my life experiences inevitably influence the process, but they aren’t the catalyst.
I’m racing against the clock. So I don’t die in the mediocrity of a remote-controlled life. If I sit down, I won’t be able to get back up.

11- Do you have to keep a raging beast inside you to create powerful music? Do you see a connection between your mental state and the mood of your music?

I don’t know. But I imagine so. It’s surely connected. I worry about my own visions and nightmares; I’ve felt different from the world around me since childhood. I can feel both proud and sad about it at the same time. My emotional rollercoaster goes up and down constantly, as if someone were pressing every button.

12- In John Carpenter’s films, as in Paul Verhoeven’s, women are the equals of men; they are independent, heroic, powerful—they endure and adapt to the world’s corruption to survive (Showgirls, Black Book, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog...). With Ninjustice (a group formed with producer Kyo Itachi), you produced the album Femme Fatal (2017) by New York rapper Marquee. How would you define that title?

Power and irreverence. That’s one of the reasons why her butt takes center stage on the cover—the raw power of a woman’s body combined with an even more developed intellect, which allows her to be an MC rather than just a rapper. Lyrics, flow—on this album, Marquee demonstrates unparalleled mastery (listen to Fairy Tales), which is why it’s the mic that’s charged with energy, not her backside. She’s as sexy as she is proud of her talent. She commands respect.

13-  On your album Ruff N'Tuff (2017), which features American MCs, there’s a track by Rah Digga (a rapper and member of the FlipMode Squad) titled after the album, is that a way of saying that a woman rapping amidst all those pairs of balls is ultimately the one with the most balls of them all? Was that intentional?

It wasn’t intentional or planned. I love women who rap with attitude, so I work with them as much as possible. If a woman does the album’s lead track, I have no problem with that. And I agree with you 100%—Rah Digga can hold her own against any of them.

14- If you had to put together an all-female album, which artists would you produce?

An all-female supergroup, huh? I’ve always dreamed of that! Three female rappers, a singer, and a DJ. For rap: Lady Of Rage + Princess Nokia + Nezi Momodu; Solange Knowles on vocals; and Erykah Badu on the turntables (she knows her DJing).

15- In my 2021 exhibition Interlope, I explored, through the lens of science fiction, insurrection as an organic reaction to the idea that a free woman might be deemed deviant by a repressive system (whether moral, male, or institutional). I referenced everything from the dirty blues sung by women in the 1930s to the rap of bad bitches through various installations. I asked you to come DJ for the opening, to put together a set in the form of an OST (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), a sonic mix filled with tracks and film clips evoking uprising, transformation, and sex. Looking at the tracklist you created, how did the songs (such as Demolition Man by Grace Jones) resonate with the exhibition’s theme?

I chose only provocative tracks. So that people would feel like they were in an arena surrounded by aggressive, threatening women screaming obscenities at them. Sexual power at the center. Women who are in control of their bodies, their emotions, and their art. Betty Davis, Madonna, Grace Jones, Vanity, Azealia Banks, Lauryn Hill, and Lil Kim are all rebels in their own way and inspired others in their time.

In their grueling struggle for equality, women have often had to make their demands heard by shocking people. By piercing the eye of morality—the very morality that has kept them locked away for far too long. It’s pure defiance. I respect that. I’d love to see women running the world; I’m convinced things would be different—for the better.

16- Let’s talk about Ruff N’Tuff (2017), an album where you don the armor of a beatmaker/producer to take on American rappers (Conway, Dirt Platoon...), on the cover we see you on the offensive, against fighters like JCVD in Full Contact. Given that Americans have a somewhat warped image of France—that of frog-eaters—is it a particular challenge as a French guy to create beats for so many massive egos? What kind of mindset does that require?

I never put myself in that “Frenchy” position—I think I’m the one with too much ego. That’s actually a subtext of Ruff N Tuff: a French guy goes there to prove who he is; he doesn’t want to become American, he just wants people to remember his name and his time there. Not by bragging, but through the power of the machines, of his beats. Music is universal. We don’t speak the same language, but we nod our heads in unison when the beat drops!

When I made this album, I had to make the artists conform to my vision. I don’t hand over the reins of my music to anyone. I provide the tracks and the direction so that everything fits together as seamlessly as possible. And as surprising as it may seem, the Americans I work with aren’t as self-centered as people might think. A European beatmaker who doesn’t really know what he wants—other than a US name tacked onto his own in exchange for euros—won’t be taken seriously. He’ll just be another customer in their fast-food joint. On the other hand, when they sense you’re precise and sincere in your direction, they follow you without hesitation and respect you.

17- When we shot the music video for Drogues dans la ville in 2011 for the album Un justicier dans la ville, I painted this wall in a vacant lot in Clichy as the backdrop for a scene; I added the tagline “Help me, I am in hell” as a reference to Hellraiser 2. For certain shots and the choice of black and white, the reference is to Gangstarr’s Just to Get a Rep. We filmed the area—the streets of the 18th arrondissement with the sex shops and urban elements from the 93—do you see yourself as a product of your environment, a bramble that has carved its way through a pile of rubble?

Absolutely. The neighborhoods you live in shape you, and you quickly realize they’re ruthless. They turn decent people into scum, and at the same time give people who start out in life with nothing the strength to achieve incredible things.
In this video, I only wanted shots of places where I’ve lived. Not to show them off, just for my brothers and me, for our memories. Thanks to you and Paik for walking with us in this direction.

18- Laurent Melki, the famous poster artist from the ’80s who blew our minds with his hand-painted movie posters, created all the album artwork. It’s a trademark of the Marvel Records label that you founded with Mc Zombi—how do you work with Melki? What kind of guidelines do you give him so he can bring his visual vision to the cover designs?

Melki is a true giant in my eyes; working with him is effortless.
He’s passionate about cinema, music, and popular art. Ask him to tell you about Midnight Rider, and you’ll see his eyes light up, just like mine. We were meant to meet. Usually, I already have a well-structured album with a dominant theme, and I always have the title. I tell him about my vision, I mention specific scenes from movies (which he knows, which helps even more) to guide him. Then he takes a sheet of paper, a pen, and starts bringing that vision to life. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s pure magic. With him, you’re dealing with a pro.

 19- Your name Venom comes from the world of superheroes and supervillains; you define yourself as a vigilante, and your first album explored the theme of vigilante justice. The album *Un justicier dans la ville* (2009)—a nod to the film of the same name starring Charles Bronson—is a metaphor, a dark urban thriller blending science fiction and horror. The city is portrayed as a nightmare, an open-air asylum where loiterers, pimps, and rapists roam.

No, there’s no ideology in my vision. I come from the hood; its codes are ingrained in me and shield me from that ambiguity. My references, my way of being and speaking—I share them with the guys I grew up with. What I’m talking about on this album is the distillation of my observations of our surroundings. Where I come from, my generation didn’t glorify drug dealers, let alone rapists. Cops harass kids and pimps rent out girls at the ring roads—it’s reality, not a movie. Everyone is a victim in their own way. The only thing we all have in common is the need to survive.
Vigilantism is a perspective in my music and also a way of raising awareness in the city through video and comic book imagery. I won’t let a guy beat up a woman right in front of me. I won’t let a neo-Nazi spout his bullshit right in front of me. Fuck politics and the rat race. On this album, I used the character of The Avenger to create a sense of emotional connection. Anger and questioning are struggles that many of us share. That’s why I’ve received just as much respect from street guys as from hip-hop fans for this album—from Morocco to Switzerland.

20- Before producing Blaq Poet’s album The Most Dangerous with Ninjustice in 2016, you released the EP Vigilante in 2011, where you both rapped on and produced the track. For this collaboration with the Queens-based MC, do you come in with a specific artistic vision, or do you give him free rein?

No direction for this track—it’s just hip-hop! He watches over New York, I watch over Paris—we each bring what we’ve got in our own style.

21- There are classic tracks by DJ Premier and Blaq Poet like “Voices,” “We Gon Ill,” “Ain’t Nuthin’ Changed,” or “Hate” ft. N.O.R.E. When Preemo comes in to remix your track, is that an accomplishment, another milestone completed on your journey?

DJ Premier is the ultimate level for me as a local vocalist and Gang Starr fan. It’s an honor to appear in his discography and, at the same time, a culmination—the benchmark to stop at. I’ve never been an MC or a rapper by vocation, and I didn’t aspire to be one. I said what I had to say through hardcore lyricism. Unlike beats, the French language doesn’t travel far enough. Mine has gone far enough as it is. Stage Clear.