Joseph Farrel is a French artist born in the Thirties. Since the Sixties, he draws for his pleasure scenes of cruelty, curtaining up on plush interiors and daily situations where the hypocrisy and domination soar in social relations.
  In the years 1975-2000, about ten albums have been released always through the underground network of the sex-shops, with titles such as Obey! Or else…, Scents of distress, Cruel games, Perversions, Humiliations, Tortured breast…

   The artist stayed all his life in these dark depths, without getting the slightest recognition. He positions himself at the opposite extreme of some glamour BDSM that would valorize women, depict them as consenting victims, beautified by the subtleties of bondage or fetish lingerie.

    In february 2017 is released a book with a sober title: Farrel, first monograph in a limited edition, set up by Christophe Bier who pays at last homage to the artist and lifts the veil from his coherent and fascinating graphite works.

   The artist notably declares : « I’m in the dark, I’m in the somber. I finished some drawings in tears. ».

  He rejects all the classical decorum that usually makes of BDSM a tale, a game (the gothic dunjon, the castles and islands out of sight). 

  Farrel favours unpretentious everyday life and an unbridled violence without any respect for proprieties, which strikes without pity upon women in tears. His work is disturbing because it rarely use extraordinary situations, on no account the result of sordid trivial events or dreadful fatalities The torturers are not serial killers but husbands, friends of the family, brothers and sisters. Past the trepidation induced by the terrifying situations, a social lampoon appears.

   Watching closer for details in the uglyness, the caricatured features of the dominants and the excesses, we get a glimpse at an art of the grotesque, between « degenerated art » and Japanese « ero-guro-nonsensu ». Maybe a bit of « art brut », or in that case « art brutal ».
   His original artwork has never been exhibited.

BOOKS