Mavado Charon, when images exceed limits

Every week in "Les 400 Culs" , Agnès Giard, an anthropologist attached to the University of Paris Nanterre and a specialist in Japan, examines contemporary sexual discourses and practices with a skeptical and detached analysis, informed by the latest research in the human and social sciences.

"My drawing technique is itching. I improvise a head in the middle of the page, which spontaneously results in a corpse in a morgue where ten characters are massacring and fucking each other." During the remote interview, Mavado Charon, 49, is in the garden of a small farm in Maine-et-Loire that he and his wife are renovating. They go there on weekends, accompanied by their daughter, to tend a vegetable garden and fruit trees. The birds chirp cheerfully around him, in total contrast to the cruel visions I keep in mind to ask the (right) questions: masturbation using a tin can with jagged edges, sodomy with rotten human trunks, bodies impaled on poles. Does he want to be reassuring?

Mavado Charon, in a soft voice, says that "the violence of the real world" is "unbearable" to him: "I'm a rather anxious person," he assures. "Perhaps that's why brutal things arouse this desire in me. They terrify me, so I draw scenes of the apocalypse."