La poussière des aïeux #[nn]

From Actes Sud's 2012 French-language catalog comes Félix Pestemer's La Poussière des aïeux, whose cover alone announces something genuinely arresting. A richly ornamented skeleton presides over a Day of the Dead–style altar crowded with candles, marigolds, fruit offerings, and a framed portrait of a young boy, while behind it looms a dense assembly of masked and skeletal figures drawn in intricate, almost ethnographic detail. Pestemer's artwork balances reverence and otherworldly strangeness, making this a striking meditation on memory, ancestry, and the elaborate rituals through which the living honor the dead.