Lidské křeslo

In this book, artist Jan Švankmajer meets two horror stories by the cult Japanese writer. Edogawa Ranpo founded the tradition of the genre of suiri shosetsu, which in Japanese means "deductive mystery fiction". Not only the mysterious and horror atmosphere of the stories, for which the author became famous, was what prompted the illustrator to create.

Jan Švankmajer describes his encounter with Ranpo's work as captivating due to its "tactility", which excites and interests him long-term. He has been working with the processing of "tactility" in art since the mid-1970s, not only in film, but also in his artistic objects and illustrations. Ranpo's unconventional stories are a challenge to a certain experimentation with the boundary of mere book illustration, which is usually understood as a subtle elaboration, an accompaniment to the prevailing text. Švankmajer takes a different approach and breaks this idea— he wants his illustrations to provide readers with a certain presence of sensory and tactile feelings. At the same time, his cinematic vision is undeniable in such a rendition — animation adds a dimension in the tradition of the stroboscope, or rather in the tradition of the legendary Linnett's "kinetograph", i.e. a series of images following one another and creating the illusion of movement by flipping through them.

The book is in Czech.