Carte Blanche Stephen Sayadian

Fantastic lightning bolts, morbid visions, shadows and lights, huge lips, a giant orgasmic tongue, swollen sexes and orgasmic eternity. You may have recognized Stephen Sayadian's fantasmatic world, also known under other aliases (Rinse Dream, Ladi Von Jansky…). He may try to hide, but he’s always recognized! His free productions have fascinated-teased (and more if affinities), the collective subconscious. Sayadian started his career as an artistic director for LFP, Larry Flynt Publications, before founding the Wolfe Studio production company, for which with photographer Francis Delia, he will conceive some of the most unforgettable posters and DVD jackets of the eighties, such as Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill, Tobe Hooper's Funhouse and John Carpenter's Fog. In the early 80s, he started a filmmaker’s career, making movies that look like no other, representative of a time when pornography had artistic, and even experimental ambitions. After the 70s sexual hedonism, came onanism. Just when the first porn tapes were commercialised, Sayadian plunged us into a surrealistic and bitter pulp world, with its bizarre humor, kitsch visions and performances, combining bad taste and poetic goals, like an act of resistance against contemporary flesh exhibitions.

Curiously, through his exciting and unleashed imagination, he marvelously reflects the present’s feeling of solitude. The results are Nightdreams, a daydream in 3 acts; Café Flesh, a dystopia exploring desire in a post apocalyptic world; or also Dr. Caligari, a fake sequel and a wacky tribute  to the German expressionist classic. In the 90s, after two savory Party Doll A-Go-Go films, Sayadian ventured into TV series on MTV, leaving room for other artists to represent sex in the movies. It wasn’t necessarily a good idea. We miss him and we won’t hesitate to ask him in person, if he’ll once again lead us into a new dream after so many years of silence: previously a guest at L’Étrange for a Focus, he now hosts a Carte Blanche, up to par with his imagination.