In Collapse, HERSOID shifts from the glossy deceit of mass messaging (as seen in Mismanaged Consent) to a quieter, more intimate form of visual decay. This series presents a set of stark, almost forensic images—crumpled cars wrapped around ghostly tree trunks, a building folding in on itself like a failed thought—drawn with surgical precision and unsettling restraint. It’s as if the artist is cataloguing the aftermath of unseen forces: not disaster as spectacle, but entropy as fact.
What’s striking here is the deliberate incompleteness. Each work feels like a sentence cut off mid-speech. The empty space is doing a lot of the talking. There’s a studied absence of narrative—no flames, no figures, no explicit violence—just the evidence of collapse. And yet, the violence is everywhere, buried in the gouges, the buckling, the broken symmetry. These are not simply ruined objects; they are portraits of structural failure, of systems folding under pressures they were never designed to withstand.
Formally, HERSOID retains his signature blend of analogue draftsmanship and minimal, almost clinical colour—a nod to the documentary impulse of early conceptual artists, but tinged with the cool detachment of postmodern architectural rendering. The influence of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” or Edward Ruscha’s deadpan studies of banal architecture lingers here, but they’re filtered through a Borges-like refusal to deliver context. There is no “before,” only the moment after everything stopped working.
In the broader arc of HERSOID’s oeuvre, Collapse serves as a kind of skeletal underpinning to the louder critiques of Mismanaged Consent and the bureaucratic surrealism of earlier series. It strips away the cultural facade to reveal the raw, twisted infrastructure beneath—a moment of crash without crescendo. If Mismanaged Consent is the lie we’re sold, Collapse is what’s left when the lie folds in on itself.
Together, these works sketch the anatomy of a civilisation quietly coming undone. There is no moralising here, only a cool recognition: even the strongest structures eventually fall.
