Joël Roche in his Paris studio.
A great engraver with a fertile imagination, he developed his work in countless plates executed with perfect rigor and surprising fantasy. His titles humorously revealed his taste for dreams and chimeras. His sources of inspiration were often literary: Edgar Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud. But these were never literal or descriptive illustrations. He freed himself from the text and went beyond it with his own reveries. (Ref.)
Sadly Joël Roche passed away in 2014.