This piece from Hersoid’s current exhibition pulls no punches. It’s a sharp visual pivot from the lethargic stillness of the seated quartet to something far more cinematic and brutal: an ambush, a collapse, or maybe just the final act of late-stage capitalism played out on a sun-bleached pavement. Three suited figures lie splayed in contorted positions, briefcases and limbs flung outward like punctuation marks in a Kafkaesque sentence that’s just lost coherence.
Where the previous piece bled out slowly—drip by drip—this one explodes in eerie silence. The drawing is stark, graphic. That humble building in the background, signposted “PRIMA” (a name laced with both optimism and sinister bureaucratic overtones), is rendered with care and texture, creating a tension between place and event. It could be a rural post office, a café, a travel agency—anything mundane enough to feel plausible. And that’s the point. In Hersoid’s world, horror hides in plain sight.
This scene reads like a still from a paranoid political allegory—something out of Costa-Gavras or The Trial reimagined in tropical decay. The specificity of the suits and briefcases links these fallen men to the machinery of systems—administration, finance, law. Yet their dramatic sprawl feels closer to Ionesco or Pinter: the aftermath of a violence no one heard, in a town that’s already forgotten.
Within the broader themes of the exhibition, this piece reinforces Hersoid’s fascination with the breakdown of order—both social and perceptual. The linework is crisp but claustrophobic. Perspective subtly collapses, especially where the building seems to warp into abstraction, unmooring the scene from any clear geography. This echoes earlier drawings in the show where figures or buildings teeter on the edge of disappearance, or where drips and distortions suggest memory overwriting reality.
Importantly, this work also deepens the show’s interplay between place and displacement. That fragile vernacular architecture—ramshackle, improvised, barely standing—mirrors the mental and institutional collapse embodied by the fallen men. These are not assassinated bodies; they are expended ones. The system they represent has chewed through them and spat them out like worn cogs.
Hersoid’s ability to conjure this kind of quiet devastation—half noir, half folktale—is what gives the exhibition its unsettling power. Nothing screams. Everything seeps. This drawing is a rupture, but a contained one. Like a fable told after curfew, it warns us in whispers.
Would you like a press-release style overview tying the exhibition together as a whole?
