A counter-culture book of the highest order. Great fun! Subversive, funny, biting art made from RUBBER stamps out of a little shop in Paris.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Vincent Sardon is a radically independent artist who began his career as political cartoonist for the left-wing Liberation, then, disillusioned, he set out on his own to make rubber stamps. He has an ardent cult following in France where a book about him Le Tampographe, is now in its third printing. A good comparison for him would be the US author/humorist/ cartoonist David Rees (Get YOur War On , How to Sharpen Pencil). He is the right artist for ATLAS OBSCURA crowd.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Some of it is word based (I don't give a Fuck, PIss Off) and many have intricate drawings -- naked gay cowboys, the middle finger, skeletons, and dragon flies. He even has "publisher stamps" with manuscript rejections and publisher correspondence ("We are pleased to announce that we will be publishing your autobiography, however your life will be as a shitty as ever.") This is a book for our times, funny and raunchy, it's also a visual delight. Who doesn't want a stamp right now that says,"Shut the Fuck Up"? Trump has a cameo on a page of stamped images of Dictators and Despots. A lefty political gift book for people who loved "We Go to the Gallery"
PRESS & PROMO: Working with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on book-related event(s) and a pop-up exhibition. Launch at NY Artsist Book Fair. Sardon has strong social media presence: 60,000 followers on Facebook. Plus, Sardon produces videos that will be used in promotion. BEA giveaway of the publisher stamps on small cards.
The Stampographer traverses the fantastic, anarchic imagination of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon (born 1970), whose dark, combative sense of humor is infused with Dadaist subversion and Pataphysical play.
Using rubber stamps he designs and manufactures himself, Sardon commandeers a medium often associated with petty and idiotic displays of bureaucratic power, then uses those stamps not to assert authority, but to refuse it. He scours the Parisian landscape as well as the world at large, skewering the power-hungry and the pretentious, reveling in the vulgar and profane.
In The Stampographer, there are insults in multiple languages, sadomasochistic Christmas ornaments, and a miniature Kamasutra with an auto-erotic Jesus. Sardon also wields the stamp as satirical device, deconstructing Warhol portraits into primary colors, turning ink blots into Pollock paint drips, and clarifying just what Yves Klein did with women's bodies. Yet Sardon’s razor-sharp wit is tinged with the irony of his exquisite sense of beauty. The stamps are rarely static—they have an animating magic, whether boxers are punching faces out of place or dragonflies seemingly hover over the page.
Sardon’s work is provocative in its subject matter as well as in its process and dissemination: he not only stands defiantly outside the art world’s modes of commerce but his artworks (the rubber stamps themselves) are actually the means with which anyone can make a work of their own. The Stampographer introduces English-speaking readers to one of the most unusual and original voices in contemporary French culture.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Vincent Sardon: The Stampographer.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Print Magazine
Steven Heller
For me, the most exciting book of the Fall publishing season (featuring one of the best covers) is The Stampographer, which showcases the fantastic, anarchic imagination of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon … There are insults in multiple languages, sadomasochistic Christmas ornaments, and a miniature Kama Sutra with an auto-erotic Jesus. Sardon also uses the stamp as satirical tool and weapon, deconstructing Warhol portraits into primary colors, turning ink blots into Pollock paint drips, and clarifying just what Yves Klein did with women’s bodies. Whew!
Publishers Weekly
Gorgeously uncouth, cynical, and—in moments—despairing, Sardon’s work primarily revels in a Dada-like spirit of playful inconsequence and good-natured goading, and it’s expertly captured here.
Paris Review
Dan Piepenbring
Its pages produce a kind of alternate bureaucracy, a profane portal dedicated not to renewing your driver’s license but to spreading chaos and fatalism, one inky impression at a time.
LA Review of Books
Mairead Case
Sardon is firm about his practice, which is rooted at once in experience and “utter uselessness” (a stamp isn’t food, it isn’t a roof). There is a punky purity here too.
AIGA
Introducing English-speaking readers to one of the most unusual and original voices in contemporary French culture.
in stock $32.50
Free Shipping
UPS GROUND IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S. FOR CONSUMER ONLINE ORDERS
FROM THE BOOK
Excerpt from the Interview with Vincent Sardon by Richard Kraft and Lisa Pearson
Q: Why rubber stamps?
A: I’m not very good at answering this kind of question; I have a hard time seeing the primary causes of my work. My work is not the only thing I have a hard time explaining. There is a long list of such things: eccentric Parisian behavior, the books on display in bookshops, the erratic love life of certain friends, jogging, concept stores, religion, seafood sauerkraut, television, colon cancer, rents in the eleventh arrondissement, skorts, and generally almost everything I see when I venture out of my workshop. My work simply reflects the world, which seems to have been created by an absolute moron. To devote one’s existence to designing stamps that are also miniature portable artistic machines seems neither more nor less stupid to me than any other human endeavor. So much for primary causes.
When I was a student I had a ton of shitty summer jobs. Once I worked in an insurance company, where I spent my days making stacks of contract cancellation letters from unhappy clients; I would stamp them before putting them on the shelf. I had a big stamp that read TO BE DESTROYED. I stamped each page. Many of the letters were extremely aggressive. Some of them were very well written; others were filled with grammatical mistakes, which somehow made them even more violent. I won’t deny that I enjoyed reading them. My interest in stamps and in a certain kind of written violence that stamps convey and amplify might perhaps date from that time.
I was an art student at the University of Bordeaux, in southwest France. Typically, French universities don’t get a lot of funding, and in this sense you could say that mine was exceedingly typical. But we had access to the engraving workshop at the school of fine arts. The professors there considered engraving to be a hopelessly outdated sub-genre, somewhere between historical paintings and cloisonné enamel. And the fine arts students wouldn’t have been caught dead in this workshop, so we had the place to ourselves. I started by engraving linoleum, copper, zinc, wood: anything I could find there. We used acid, varnish, iron perchloride and all kinds of quirky, somewhat toxic techniques that I liked a lot. It was around this time that I began to engrave stamps with gouge chisels on linoleum or wood. I was broke, so I bought cheap convenience store erasers and used them to make stamps, too. With these, I printed fanzines that I would sell for five francs a copy. Once I sold twenty copies, I would call a friend and we would drink the proceeds in a little bar down the road from where I lived.
Once I graduated, I joined the “workforce” (horrible word). My first job was doing illustration. I was obsessed with drawing. I drew all the time. As soon as I had a minute to spare, I’d take my pad out and go at it. I ghost illustrated some stuff for a Gallimard author, a creep with one of those stupid floppy fringe hairstyles who exploited about a dozen kids like me; then I moved to Paris. I was twenty-five years old. I went to show my drawings to newspapers and quickly found work as a political illustrator for Libération and Le Monde. I was more obsessed than ever with drawing and spent hours honing caricatures of Jacques Chirac, Lionel Jospin, and George W. Bush. I hated every minute of it, but I was in denial. Then, slowly the stamps began to take over. The more I hated working for newspapers, the more this thing was getting bigger. That’s how it started.
Congratulations to Siglio Press, whose new monograph, Vincent Sardon: The Stampographer, has received high praise from Publishers Weekly. A playful book on Sardon’s sometimes shockingly complex, sometimes “gorgeously uncouth, cynical, and … despairing” rubber stamps, this will amaze or amuse pretty much anybody. “Rather than black-and-red-inked denials or affirmations, on display are stamps featuring the faces of world dictators, nude cowboys, and bondage-themed Christmas ornaments. Others spell out pointed insults, e.g., ‘douche,’ ‘Your life is meaningless,’ and ‘Your manuscript is so bad that while considering it, our entire reading committee got cancer and died.’” continue to blog
Let’s face it, the holidays can be oppressive—psychologically, spiritually, emotionally and aesthetically. Our antidote: Vincent Sardon: The Stampographer, published by Siglio Press. Case in point: Sardon’s sado-masochistic Christmas tree ornament stamps. With just two colors of ink and a few blocks of rubber, Sardon is able to produce an image that is at once festive, ironic, delicate, vulgar, offensive, hilarious, ridiculous and completely original, even as it is also infinitely and intentionally reproducible by anyone with the nerve to stop by his small storefront studio in Paris. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The perfect holiday gift book for the one who doubts everything. continue to blog
Who wouldn’t want a collection of stamps engraved with the phrases, “Useful Idiot,” “Art Opening Cockroach,” “Little Inadvertently Wealthy Avant-Gardest” or “Intern Fondler” to comment upon unwelcome invitations, forced correspondence, and irritating ephemera? Perhaps you’d like to stamp your own notes-to-self with the descriptors, “Goddess of Sex and Destruction,” “Inventor of Disco,” “Matador of Love,” or “Descendent of the Prophet.” All these, and much darker, more erotic, even worse, are collected in Siglio’s staff favorite new release, Vincent Sardon: The Stampographer. continue to blog
“The stamp is never neutral,” Vincent Sardon is quoted in his new monograph, The Stampographer. “It packs a symbolic wallop because of the millions of judges, cops, customs officials—agents of public authority—who use them to validate passports, to turn people away at the border, to pass judgement, to pass laws, to sentence, to record proceedings, to excommunicate—all sorts of evil documents that have the power to of putting people in impossible situations. Any absurdity presented in this manner becomes ten times more powerful thanks to the magic wand of graphics. It is this mysterious power that fascinates me and that I continue to explore. Once upon a time newspapers had this kind of sacred power, but no more.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7.75 x 10.5 in. / 108 pgs / 200 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $32.50 LIST PRICE: CANADA $42.5 GBP £28.50 ISBN: 9781938221163 PUBLISHER: Siglio AVAILABLE: 11/21/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD Except France
The Stampographer traverses the fantastic, anarchic imagination of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon (born 1970), whose dark, combative sense of humor is infused with Dadaist subversion and Pataphysical play.
Using rubber stamps he designs and manufactures himself, Sardon commandeers a medium often associated with petty and idiotic displays of bureaucratic power, then uses those stamps not to assert authority, but to refuse it. He scours the Parisian landscape as well as the world at large, skewering the power-hungry and the pretentious, reveling in the vulgar and profane.
In The Stampographer, there are insults in multiple languages, sadomasochistic Christmas ornaments, and a miniature Kamasutra with an auto-erotic Jesus. Sardon also wields the stamp as satirical device, deconstructing Warhol portraits into primary colors, turning ink blots into Pollock paint drips, and clarifying just what Yves Klein did with women's bodies. Yet Sardon’s razor-sharp wit is tinged with the irony of his exquisite sense of beauty. The stamps are rarely static—they have an animating magic, whether boxers are punching faces out of place or dragonflies seemingly hover over the page.
Sardon’s work is provocative in its subject matter as well as in its process and dissemination: he not only stands defiantly outside the art world’s modes of commerce but his artworks (the rubber stamps themselves) are actually the means with which anyone can make a work of their own. The Stampographer introduces English-speaking readers to one of the most unusual and original voices in contemporary French culture.
