Sigismond de Vajay

"Conceived by Sigismond de Vajay, this artist's book combines 70 of his drawings with commissioned essays by Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, French biologist and glaciology researcher Bruno Jourdain, and geography and biotechnology expert Elizabeth R. Johnson. Together, thanks to their intertwined dialogue around reality, fiction, science, knowledge, and the power of artistic approaches, they express a subjective vision of our changing times. Vajay's practice emphasizes the systems that govern the planet, irregularities and social differences, power and global control. From a disenchanted perspective, his art oscillates ceaselessly between the human and the machine, the individual and the mass, or between nature and technology. Through his pencil and watercolor drawings, produced between 2012 and 2017, Vajay explores themes and motifs such as postindustrial landscapes, endangered natural spaces, and lonesome machines, as well as complex human, natural, and architectural organizations. Some drawings are short stories to decipher, while others manage to show, in a single stunning image, the complexity of our time and our future"--Publisher's website.