Parfums de souffrance (Perfumes of Suffering, though the English translation on the cover is the rather awkward Painful Flavours), is a collection of thirty pencil drawings, this time with texts dictated by Farrel to his friend Robert Mérodack, who also assisted in translating them to English. Along with the drawings Farrel included a note to Mèrodack: ‘My friend Roger, I have written some texts for you. You can adapt them as you wish, or if it’s someone else they can adapt them as they wish. In general I’m happy doing the drawings but not the texts, because I prefer to leave it up to people to interpret the drawing as they see fit. Maybe some faces remind them of their mother, their wife or their sister, and my interpretation will not necessarily be theirs. Anyway, you can do what you want with it.’ 

By the late 1970s Farrel had found his preferred style, detailed pencil drawings exploring extreme sado-masochism. But his is not the baroque setting of Sade’s castles, nunneries and dungeons, it is what Christophe Bier calls ‘The Formica Furniture’, the everyday settings of Farrel’s imaginings. In his conversation with Ayzad, Bier offers his understanding of the fascination of Farrel’s work: ‘The social criticism is inherently there, because Farrel is inspired only by what surrounds him. The characters look like the ordinary people he meets, his neighbours, his bosses. The settings are taken from direct experience. He doesn’t revel in fantasy or porno-chic. Farrel focuses on the world of the French middle classes. With his violent art he dismembers much of the niceness of the standard French social model. He likes to depict even the most violent erotic cruelty in a relatable way, in “normal” surroundings. We often see jubilant torturers but also placid voyeurs, all of them callous toward the pain they cause; they are the archetypal sadists. It all trivialises violence and makes it even more unbearable. In the texts accompanying some drawings we are struck by the joking tone of the dialogues. Sadism becomes almost banal.’

Parfums de souffrance was published by Éditions Dominique Leroy in the ‘Collection Secrète’. It was later reissued in 1979 in the Vertiges Graphiques collection, then again by Roger Finance as a Delta Plus title.

If you are interested in reading the texts as well as seeing the drawings, a complete online version of Parfums de souffrance with texts in French and English can be found here.