ROLAND TOPOR
(1938 - 1997)

Roland Topor was an artistic centipede: he was a writer, a graphic artist, an actor, a director and a stage and costume designer.
He was born in Paris in 1938 and studied at the Academie de Beaux Arts. His first drawings were published in magazines like Bizarre and Le Rire. Between 1961 and 1965 he collaborated in the  Hara-Kiri magazine and founded the Panique group, together with Arrabal, Jodorowsky and Sternberg. From that time on he has had numerous expositions all over Europe, among those the one of the Panic Group in 1972 in the Grand Palais in Paris. There was a big retrospective exposition in 1985 in Munich, Topor, the death and the devil.
At the same time he has written many plays for the theatre, like Joko fête son anniversaire. His last play L'hiver sous la table (Winter under the table) was performed in Brussels in 1996. For this performance he also designed the costumes and scenes.
In the cinema he has played as an actor in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann and has directed movies like La Maladie de Hambourg and Marquis.

Roland Topor has received the Grand Prix des Arts from the city of Paris.

This deck was published in 1988 by the SCOR, an investment group with an eye for the arts. Topor has made the illustrations of their annual report and these were used for the deck as well. The deck was printed by Grimaud.

A TYPICAL TOPOR SOUVENIR

Being an artist who seeks the absurdity, he couldn't resist to make fun of his own writing and produced this unreadable book in the late 1970's. The book has 16 pages where all the words -just like on the cover- have been made  unreadable, transforming it into a useless thing,  a "souvenir". In french this word is also used as a verb, meaning "to remember".
And how many books do we have on our shelves that we have read, but who's content we ourselves have erased from our minds?