Yoshifumi Hayashi - The Alchemy of the Brain in Lead Pencil

Yoshifumi Hayashi - The Alchemy of the Brain in Lead Pencil, published in 2024 by Arsenicgalerie in France / ISBN 9782957773954 / 128-page hardback, 9.5 x 11.7 inches, bilingual French & English / a very intense artist so buyer beware (the images shown here are the less-strange ones!)

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The first monograph on the Japanese artist of desire.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Xavier-Gilles Néret analyzes the work of Yoshifumi Hayashi from an existential and philosophical as well as artistic perspective, drawing on his interviews with the Japanese artist who, for almost half a century, has shamelessly asserted the importance of sexual desire and the body in all its material dimensions.

From his erotic drawings of callipagous women to his sexualized landscapes, from his vulvar and ithyphallic flowers to his "still lifes" teeming with life, Hayashi pursues his quest for the mysteries of matter through the subtle play of light in the gradations of lead pencil, of which he has become a virtuoso alchemist, to fuel irrepressible desire and "repassionate life".

Yoshifumi Hayashi (born 1948 in Fukuoka, Japan) is an artist specializing in scenes of female erotica. In 1974 he moved to Paris, where he began to produce pencil drawings. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy… Hayashi's art comes straight from the darkest depths of his subconscious and the artist lays his innermost paranoias, fetishes and obsessions. Despite this profoundly personal quality his work is also highly and objectively erotic.