Fire Work With Me | Valnoir

Hello Robert,
We don’t know each other, but I’m an old friend of Mirko Ilic. I’m about to release an art-book about my work as a designer, and Mirko was kind enough to write a text about my work.
I need a photo to illustrate his text, and I really, REALLY love this image : /www.facebook.com/photo.php/

Valnoir

I was introduced to the work of Paris-based Valnoir of Metastazis Studio when MIrko Ilic, not known for squeamishness, showed me photos of the designer/artist printing posters with his own blood. “Now that’s an investment,” I thought, and was about to turn away with my hand holding my stomach, until I saw the result. This Valnoir guy is good. Not just the chances he takes (including sewing a poster to his body) but the intricacy of his stylistic explorations. A new book, Fire Work With Me: 15 Years of Metastazis Studio Collected Works (Timeless Press), shows the evolution and devolution of art and soul, body and mind, in an exquisite yet disturbing compilation. The book and work, much of it gouged with irony for metal and politics and heavy political metal bands, is not for everyone, but everyone should take a look. | Steven Heller’s new article about the book Fire Work With Me!

Published by Timeless – 2016 – France
24 x 28 cm- 276 pages in colours – Hard Bound Cloth

This nearly 300-pages book FIRE WORK WITH ME presents a broad selection of many of the visual productions created by the graphic design studio Metastazis this past 15 years. It goes way beyond the mere compilation of album covers: FIRE WORK WITH ME offers more than a decade of documents, studies, and often unpublished texts. For his work exceeds by far the limits of common musical illustration, Valnoir, leader of the studio, hereby reveals a wide range of projects that flirt with contemporary arts and the fringes of legality.

Among the 70 bands and artists he works with since the early 2000s can be found Alcest, Amorphis, Arcturus, Behemoth, Blut Aus Nord, Laibach, Morbid Angel, Paradise Lost, Samael, Secrets of the Moon , Sunn O))), The Black Dahlia Murder , Trivium, Ulver, Urfaust, Watain… But also a vast array of projects, including in cooperation with north korean state, and thoroughly documented.

Many leading figures in the worlds of design and music, such as David Vincent (Morbid Angel), Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver), Erik Danielsson (Watain), Mkm (Antaeus) as well as Steven Heller (honored by first lady Michelle Obama for the National US design award), Mirko Ilic, Miran Mohar (NSK) or Morten Traavik exclusively contributed to this publication by providing their own texts and articles.

Mirko Ilić – who wrote the foreword of the book