Roland Topor

Roland Topor (1938-1997), painter, illustrator, poet, songwriter, playwright, director, filmmaker, and photographer, a French artist impossible to categorize, first gained prominence with the grotesque drawings he published in the satirical magazine Hara-KiriWinner of Grand Prix de L'Humour Noir In 1961, he drew inspiration from the Surrealists and responded to them with the movement. Panic, which he founded with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky, among others. His first and most celebrated novel, The Chimeric Locator (1964), adapted for the cinema by Roman Polanski (The Tenant(1976), tells the story of a bureaucrat grappling with identity crises and paranoia. In text as well as images, Topor throws us into an upside-down world, and the animalistic cruelty, eroticism, scatology, and grim irony of his works earned him the scorn of critics, several ruinous projects, and daily death threats. The pleasure was all his.