Fornicon

"I was the chauvinist pig, the macho," says Tomi Ungerer. "I refused sentimentality. But since from an early age I considered women as pals, as equals, I had an equitable relationship with them. I liked American girls because they were direct."
Conceived in 1966, Fornicon is a book of erotic satire that criticises mechanised and robotic sexuality. While we can see him reflecting on a period when the liberation of morals had become a societal demand, the book is essentially satire. What served as models for Tomi Ungerer here were 1960s Barbie dolls, dislocated and reassembled as sex machines. The drawings are done in Indian ink using pen and paintbrush. In their linear graphics and special perspective effects, their monastic appearance accentuating the harshness of the subject, some of these drawings evoke the erotic drawings of the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. What characterises this satire on modern sexuality is a recurrent depiction of mechanisms, objects or cogs being confronted with human bodies. This recalls the activity of the Ungerer family, who had been watchmakers and were also specialised in the construction of astronomical clocks and their automata. Human beings associated with objects and machines, a theme recurrent in Tomi Ungerer's work, create an infernal world where there is no longer any communication and where the slogan, "Enjoy without limits", shows its limits.