Erotic and Heretic: Ester Cardella Draws What Was Called a Sin
Dante Remy |
It began, she says, at four in the morning.
Rain outside. A single desk lamp angled down onto the paper and nowhere else. A young woman in Palermo, in what she later called "a particular emotional state," with an overwhelming need to get everything out of her. She started drawing on impulse, and when she looked up, a naked woman had appeared on the page, and behind her arms, a skeleton.
"Eroticism and darkness revealed themselves immediately," Ester Cardella told PDQ Magazine years later. "They were two forces closed inside a single thing." That first drawing still hangs on the wall of her studio. She calls it a symbol of an opening, a door into a world that keeps unveiling itself.
What came through that door is everything she had been taught to give up "because it's a sin." An Italian profile later gave it a name, eroetica: erotic and heretic, which is exactly how she describes herself.
I know that door. Anyone who has spent time with Ester's work does. It is the reason I asked her to illustrate The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, Volume II, and it is the reason her ink now walks beside the words of writers from around the world in that book.
Who Is Ester Cardella? A Sicilian Illustrator Born Between Sea and Mountain
Ester Cardella was born in Palermo in 1992 and grew up in the rural surroundings of Monte Pellegrino, the great limestone headland that stands over the city and the sea. Her family leaned artistic, and she has said she has been drawing "for as long as I can remember. I always had a pencil in my hand."
She came up through Palermo's art schools, first the Liceo Artistico Damiani Almeyda and then the city's comics school, where students work through many genres. Then, one day, the class reached erotica. "When we approached the erotic genre, I found myself very much at ease," she told Vanity Fair Italia. "Drawing female forms made me feel good."
Her early professional years were spent in the dark. She worked with an independent noir writer based in Las Vegas, then drew horror and splatter for the Italian publisher Edizioni Inkiostro, including pages for the series The Cannibal Family. She was good at it. But in 2019, she says, she stopped. "I felt my fire inside, and I wasn't listening to it. I was drawing, but I didn't recognize myself."
So she closed herself in the studio, alone with the paper, and found her own language.
She has never forgotten where she comes from. "I was born poor," she told StrettoWeb, explaining that she did not choose drawing for money, and that for years she worked other jobs to keep her art alive. Today she lives from it. And Sicily is in every page. "My inspiration doesn't come only from Palermo, but from all of Sicily," she has said. "Every sunset, every sky, every lake has a color that never repeats. It's an island that contains everything: sea, mountain, fresh water, wind."
There is a particular kind of Sicilian eroticism, older than the Church and never quite conquered by it, and Ester draws from that well.
Eroetica: Erotic and Heretic, the Dark Erotic Art of Ester Cardella
When the Calabrian outlet StrettoWeb profiled her in 2024, they coined a word for her work: eroetica, a fusion of erotica and eretica, erotic and heretic, which is how she describes herself.
The heresy is deliberate, and it is personal. The sin in question is not an abstraction. "So often in my life I've had to give things up 'because it's a sin,'" she said. "Because you can't dress, speak or sit a certain way because you're a woman." What she was told was a sin, she now draws in ink.
Which is why the nun appears again and again in her work. For Ester, the nun is a symbol of deprivation: a woman who surrenders her sexuality, her femininity and motherhood to follow a creed. When her nuns kneel, they kneel to their own bodies. When they suffer, they feel pleasure in the same breath. It is, she says, a contradiction that only shows "that we are human." And she is blunt about what happens when desire is buried rather than honored: "Repression leads to perversion. If you don't take care of your own sexuality, it becomes a monster."
Readers of this blog will recognize the lineage. It is the same war between cloister and flesh that runs through Rosa Belinda Coote's The Convent School and through my own meditations on the eroticism of life, faith and death. Ester simply draws it with a steadier hand and a sharper pen.
She has even met the people her drawings unsettle most. She once told of a young woman, makeup-free and clearly far from the social world, who came to her stand at a convention. She had just spent a year in a convent and wanted to know why Ester drew nuns. They talked for a long time. "She gave me so much," Ester said, "and I hope I gave her even a little of what she gave me."
Eros and Thanatos: Skeletons, Vampires and the Beauty That Doesn't Last
If eroticism is half of Ester's world, darkness is the other half, and she will not let you have one without the other.
"I like horror, the gothic, the dark," she has said. "I think eroticism and horror are a bit like yin and yang. A sensual woman drawn in a gloomy setting: light and darkness, the expression of the duality we all have."
The skeleton that appeared in her first drawing never left. It returns, wrapped around her women, as a reminder, she told Vanity Fair Italia, "that beauty is fleeting." Italian Wikipedia sums up her mature style as built around the pairing of Eros and Thanatos: female anatomy and nudity set beside skulls, bones and gothic symbolism.
And then there is the vampire. Ester likes to call herself a vampira. A vampire woman stalks her comics, seductive, merciless and impossible to ignore, and she describes the creature as "a metaphor, a symbol of my darkest, hungriest parts." She wrote and drew a vampire story, Bloodlust, for the German black-and-white horror magazine Feral. That is a title close to my own heart, as anyone who has read my Bloodlust essays will know.
A Woman Drawing Women: Erotic Illustration from the Female Gaze
Here is where Ester's work stops being merely beautiful and becomes important.
"It has always been men, not women, who drew us," she told Vanity Fair Italia. "When a woman illustrates eros, and chooses a woman as protagonist, the rules are subverted."
Her women do not pose for the viewer. They confront him. "The women in my drawings are always very strong," she told PDQ Magazine. "They don't enter the space of the paper sweetly or delicately. They don't ask permission. They just do it." In many of her stories, she says, the man is almost always the submissive.
Asked what she'd want her figures to say to the viewer if they could speak, she answered: "I love myself. I am full of myself."
She is generous about the masters of Italian erotic comics. She credits Milo Manara, Guido Crepax and Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri for technique, and looks to Hugo Pratt and Enki Bilal as well. But she is clear that her message is different. "I see the woman as myself. It's as if I'm looking in a mirror without seeing myself as an object of desire from the male point of view. Here, the woman is the subject." In 2024 she designed the official variant poster for Etna Comics in Catania, a year after Manara drew the festival's main poster. "We both work in the erotic genre," she said, "so we're on the same wavelength."
Her true masters, she says, are Caravaggio and the comics artist Andrea Pazienza. Caravaggio, "for the passion, the reality, the light that tears away lies," because he painted dirty feet when patrons expected otherwise and used prostitutes as models for the Madonna. Pazienza, because he put himself into everything, "his melancholies, his nostalgias. That sincerity that doesn't hide."
You can see both in her line: the chiaroscuro drama and the confessional nakedness.
Ink, Not Pixels: How Ester Cardella Works
Ester works exclusively by hand. No tablet, no digital tools: pencil, then ink, almost always in black and white, with color used only when it means something. Every commission is an original, which means no two collectors own the same piece, and her collectors are everywhere, from the United States and Mexico to France, Spain, England and Australia.
She is unsentimental about machines making art. "Emotion only seeps out of a work if there is a human being behind it," she told Hestetika Magazine. "What I love about my work isn't the finished piece, it's the whole process in between." Her studio, she admits, holds a PC, a scanner and "immense chaos," comics by artists she admires, photographs, and words she has written on the walls. One of them is Nietzsche: become who you are.
That philosophy runs through her images of restraint. Ropes, chains and bindings recur in her drawings, but she insists they point somewhere else entirely. "It seems like a paradox," she said, "but in the constriction of chains, laces, tight bands, I want to give that sense of oppression that takes you to a place that is elsewhere, beyond the body. Feeling bound and constrained is really an invitation to go away, beyond, elsewhere." She describes kink, in her art, as "the sublimation of an erotic act, where the body is involved whole, naked and alive."
If that line of thinking speaks to you, it is the same territory explored in my essay on the liberation of desire through fetishism, BDSM and shibari.
The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, Volume II: Ester Among the International Creators
When we began building the second volume of The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, I knew it had to be more than a collection of stories. It had to be a meeting place, a book in which writers from different countries, different traditions and very different temperaments could share one bed.
The result is a collection of tales that are, as the jacket puts it, "confessions, reckonings, and awakenings." They range from the tender to the taboo, from the playful to the apocalyptic: consensual group surrender as an act of self-possession, sapphic wrestling that becomes a lesson in power and release, clandestine encounters that blur the line between sin and salvation. The contributors include Ava Lee, Paul Gibbons, Tiggs, Artgasim and JK Mill, among others, from established voices to anonymous and first-time authors. Some of you already know Ava Lee from her Kinky Kaffeehaus.
And then there is the artist who binds them together.
Ester's black-and-white illustrations run through the volume as a visual counterpart to the text, capturing moments of power, surrender, intimacy and transformation. A Palermo artist whose work already crossed borders, she had been published in a German magazine, taken her work abroad and drawn for collectors on several continents. That made her the right hand to draw an international chorus. Each story arrived in its own voice and its own country's idiom of desire. Ester met every one of them in the same universal language: ink on paper, light against darkness, a woman who will not lower her eyes.
That is what makes Volume II as much a gallery as an anthology. You read a story, turn the page, and Ester has drawn the moment the words were circling, the instant just before or just after surrender.
If you collected Volume I: Fetish, illustrated by Coax, you'll see the series has changed its skin. Volume I was a fetish book. Volume II is broader, more literary and more psychological. Ester's art is the reason it feels that way.
Read the stories. Own the art. The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, Volume II, illustrated by Ester Cardella and edited by Dante Remy, is available now as a paperback from Erosetti Press and in a hardcover edition sold only at Erosetti Press.
From Palermo to the World: Exhibitions, Artbooks and Recognition
The years since that four-in-the-morning drawing have been busy ones.
Etna Comics 2024. Ester designed the festival's official variant poster, La mia Donna Velata ("My Veiled Woman"), an homage to the mysterious veiled woman of Luigi Pirandello's play Così è (se vi pare). In her version, the woman lets fall the mask that represents fear, and the veil with it. The keys to the house rest on a book beneath the window: she is free to leave, and chooses to stay.
Lucca Comics & Games. She has exhibited and drawn live at Italy's biggest comics festival, as well as at Palermo Comic Convention, Cortona Comics and Cosenza's Festival del Fumetto, where she taught a masterclass on erotic comics.
The artbooks. A limited-edition artbook with Libritalia debuted in 2023. In 2025 came her 104-page numbered artbook from Lo Scarabocchiatore Edizioni, introduced by Dylan Dog writer Andrea Cavaletto. In 2026 she released Eros Thanatos, a portfolio made entirely of ink self-portraits.
The press. She has drawn for la Repubblica's Palermo edition, including Gulp! Rosalia, a reimagining of the story of Santa Rosalia, the city's patron saint. She also created a World War I calendar, commissioned by a museum curator in Trentino, that put the uniforms on women.
Abroad. She has taken her work to Malta and Croatia and announced a solo exhibition in Berlin, and she writes and draws for the German horror magazine Feral.
Why Ester Cardella's Erotic Art Matters Now
We live in an era when algorithms flatten desire into thumbnails, and when an erotic image made by a machine can appear in a second. Ester's work is the opposite of that. It is slow. It is handmade. It is, in her word, autobiographical. "In every one of my works there's something autobiographical," she has said. "Even when I draw for others, I always put a piece of myself in."
She speaks of her art as therapy, as meditation, as the key to a cage. "I think I lived inside a cage for a long time," she told Hestetika, "and always had the key in my hands." The cage was both refuge and prison. The key was the freedom to choose. The way out, she says, was love: the love of discovering herself.
That is, finally, what erotic art is for. Not titillation, but recognition. Ester's women look back at us, and for a moment we have to decide whether we are brave enough to look back at ourselves.
Her family made their own decision. Her grandmother keeps her erotic calendars and marks her appointments on them, proudly. Her brother comes to every exhibition. "Often I was the one who was ashamed," Ester admitted. "They always supported me."
Bring Ester Cardella's Art Home: The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, Volume II
If you have read this far, you already know you want to see these drawings on paper, beside the stories they were made for.
The Anthology of Erotic Narrative, Volume II brings together erotic fiction from a global range of voices with original black-and-white illustrations by Ester Cardella, the Sicilian artist who draws desire in ink and shadow. It is published by Black Fern, an imprint of Erosetti Press. It runs 112 pages and is made for the erotic library: intimate, fearless and unforgettable.
Then go back to the beginning. A woman, a lamp, the rain, a skeleton appearing behind her arms. Every great erotic book starts like that: with someone brave enough to keep drawing.
— ©️2026 Dante Remy
Ester Cardella's quotations are translated from Italian interviews in Vanity Fair Italia, BE Sicily Mag, StrettoWeb, PDQ Magazine, Hestetika Magazine and LiveUnict.
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