[VENTRE] Artbook

Artbook 115 pages + audio CD 35 min

Images & texts : Nihil
Music : In Slaughter Natives
Published by Cyclic Press

 

Ventre is a fictional universe growing and mutating within me since childhood. It’s an imaginary world where I took refuge from harsh reality, where unconscious fears and forgotten memories emerge as grotesque figures populating surreal landscapes, where everything appears as symbols and disguised archetypes. It’s an ever-changing and bizarre tale marked by mystical heights and regressive downfalls. It’s full of my obsessions for religion, my aspirations to isolation, my doubts about individuality and reality as we perceive it.

In its current form, Ventre started in 2004 as a series of short texts and soon developed to include images as well, exploring transcendence and identity matters. After more than ten years of work, the Ventre artbook collects ten cryptic and philosophical texts and seventy-five portraits of saints and martyrs, including a retrospective of past works and a number of previously unreleased ones. The book comes with a soundtrack composed especially for this project by In Slaughter Natives, pioneer of the ambient industrial scene. In Slaughter Natives’ music is with me since years and deeply imprinted my work. It contributes to create a complete sensitive experience along with the texts and images, in a natural symbiosis of ambiances and inspirations.

 

“Ventre is a voyage through filth, cruelty and decay. It’s a hard trip into the darkest labyrinths of the soul, a mystic rite of passage into the Tunnels of Set and the forbidden Qlippoth.” (Cvlt Nation)

 

“”A perfectly successful cooperation of two masters of dark art. An amazing artistic synthesis.” (Inside Artzine)

 

“So many of Nihil’s figures have no eyes or have covered faces, blindness being a recurring motif in his writing, showing how our limited knowledge does nothing to save us and only serves to remind of those limits. We suffer for our incapacity to transcend those limits…” (Kevin Pinkerton)

 

 

 

 

 

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