Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST. One Micro, one Slim. Both limited.
Niark1 has been painting monsters in Paris for a long time, and two of them just found their way onto Tyvek. One wallet is a crowd of them. The other is a cat, and the cat is not friendly either.
Monsters Crew (Micro)
Four panels of grainy orange, teal and navy, each one a different face. Top left, a single huge eye in a diamond, red iris, teardrops falling off the corners. Bottom left, a horned thing with one eye and a lot of attitude. Right side, the big one: a fanged head with a three-eyed crown, lightning bolts off the cheeks, a mouth full of triangle teeth, and a band of colored dots along the bottom like a belt.
Everything's built from flat geometric shapes with heavy grain on top, so it reads like a screen print of something a lot older than a screen print. Tribal mask, arcade cabinet art, seventies horror poster. All three at once.
Open it and there's one more, filling the whole interior. Symmetrical. Two big orange eyes with vertical pupils, a triangle-toothed mouth in the middle, and that dot-band running across the top. It's looking straight at you and it's been waiting.
Bird & Cat (Slim)
The Slim is a jungle. Deep navy and teal, orange fronds, hanging vines, and a black cat walking through all of it with its tail up and its yellow eyes fixed on you. A pale mask-like shape hangs in the foliage behind it. There's an orange stripe running the top edge like a sunset that hasn't finished. Niark1's signature sits in the corner.
Inside, the bird. A geometric head in teal and navy with one enormous eye and a sharp beak, on a mustard yellow ground with rain-streaks, surrounded by odd small objects: a key, an anchor, a fork shape, clouds. It's cut-paper flat, mid-century flat, and it does not look like it's going to survive its encounter with the outside of the wallet.
Cat on the cover. Bird on the inside. You can work out the rest.
Who Niark1 Is
Sébastien Feraut, working as Niark1. Born in Paris, studied art and visual communication, spent the early part of his career in web design, then went freelance as a graphic designer, illustrator and artist. He splits his time between commercial work for music festivals, clothing brands and ad agencies, and his own paintings.
The paintings are where the monsters live. Skulls, eyes, teeth, creatures stacked on creatures, all rendered in layers of tiny detail and colors that don't occur in nature. He cites influences running from eighties horror to Francis Bacon, from constructivism to David Lynch, and you can find every one of those in Monsters Crew if you look.
His work has run in Le Monde and La Tribune, and since his first solo show in 2010 he's exhibited in France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Italy and the US. There's a Monster Club on his site. It's exactly what it sounds like.
Two More Coming
These aren't the only Niark1 drops this season. Eyeballs and Collage Monster land on the Micro on October 27. If Monsters Crew is your thing, that's your calendar note.
Format
Monsters Crew is a Micro Wallet: 1.3mm thin, 6 to 8 cards plus folded cash, front pocket.
Bird & Cat is a Slim Wallet: about 3mm, 12 to 16 cards plus folded cash.
Both are RFID-blocking, like everything we make apart from the coin pouch. Both are Tyvek, waterproof at the fiber level and tear-resistant, and grainy screen-print work like this ages well as the material creases.
Who's Copping This
Horror people who want it stylized instead of gory. This is monsters as pattern, not monsters as splatter.
Screen print and gig poster collectors. The grain, the limited palette, the flat shapes. Same language.
Cat owners with a specific kind of cat. You know the one. It's on the front of the Slim.
Anyone building a Niark1 set before the October pair lands.
Drop
Tomorrow, 11:30 AM EST. Monsters Crew in the Micro Wallet collection, Bird & Cat in the Slim Wallet collection. Limited runs, no restock, no reprint. The full collection has the rest.
