Valnoir

Jean-Emmanuel "Valnoir" Simoulin (1979) studied graphic design at EPSAA (Paris) for 5 years and graduated in 2004.

At first mostly influenced by the Slovenian collective NSK, he withdrew from commercial and corporate design to focus on extreme underground music scenes, such as noise, industrial and black metal, grounds of expression that are supposed to be free of the client's usual domination over the designer.

In 2006 he wrote a manifesto stating that the client must trust the designer's artistic stance from A to Z, accept or reject the project in its entirety, without any compromise.

Nowadays, his work oscillates between visually overloaded religious/ totalitarian decors and violent narrative concepts, between graphic minimalism and experiments involving the human body, such as printing posters with human blood-based ink (2010), sewing patches onto human skin (2012) or making ink out of human bones (2013).

In 2013, he has worked with more than 150 bands, including Alcest, Antaeus, The Black Dahlia Murder, Blut Aus Nord, Laibach, Morbid Angel, Paradise Lost, Peste Noire, Taake, Ulver or Watain. His studio, Metastazis, is based in Paris.