Recently my friend Michael called to say that he’d picked up a used copy of The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna. He told me a bit about it and said it was full of amazing illustrations by Wilfred Sätty. I was unfamiliar with Sätty’s work, and when I looked him up I was BLOWN AWAY.

Beside illustrating the Archaic Revival, Sätty created a large series of images based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, designed show posters, and made an abundance of personal work for his own books; some released, some not.

These days so many images are created with the assistance of computers, photoshop and other modern shortcuts. It can be hard to imagine the painstaking, time consuming methods Sätty employed to create his hallucinatory collages.

Drawing from his enormous collection of 19th-century illustrations, and using his knowledge of overprinting, collage, overlays, paints and offset lithography, Satty superimposed and juxtaposed images to create layered compositions of such wildness, density and subtle detail that they speak more tellingly than any static visual records of the time could do. His transformations of the original materials range from the discreet addition of a few whimsical oddities in the foreground of an etching, to the full-out hallucinations of an opium den or a ballroom swirling with romantic delirium. And the fact that these are all 19th-century images, radically revised by a 20th-century eye, gives one the eerie sense of shifting back and forth in time, space and perception. EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW – AUGUST 1984 – BY KATE REGAN – SATTY: FEVER DREAMS OF THE CITY’S HISTORY via zpub