96 pages Edited by Sophie Toulouse 21 x 17 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Drago 2019
An artist's book in the form of a state. The Paris-based illustrator Sophie Toulouse invents a fictional nation and equips it with everything a regime needs — iconography, slogans, propaganda — built on the values of beauty, purity and innocence. The seduction turns quickly: the messages read as a totalitarian programme, and the whole thing lands as a satire of the advertising strategies of consumer culture, with the fashion industry's cult of perfection as its principal target. Neo-baroque drawing fused with computer graphics, cold flat language against a mass-media carnival.
Volume in Drago's 36 Chambers, the Rome publisher's pocket-format artist series that also carried Mike Giant, TV Boy, Evol, Pisa73 and Julie Watai. Toulouse works across drawing, animation and commercial commissions (Nike, IBM, Lalique, Galeries Lafayette) and went on to found the art review The Drawer in 2010.
