Hersoid’s new piece from the latest exhibition—seen here with its melancholic quartet slumped in a loose, purgatorial waiting room—draws a direct line from the existential dread of Kafka to the psychological dislocation of Beckett. The figures, rendered in fragile linework and bleeding washes of orange-red ink, are not so much seated as suspended—dangling somewhere between bureaucratic inertia and metaphysical exhaustion. The drips are particularly arresting. They run like time, or blood, or bureaucratic ink—slow, inevitable, indifferent. Aesthetically, they echo the controlled chaos of Egon Schiele’s stained edges, but narratively they’re closer to The Trial or Waiting for Godot: no arrival, no explanation, just a long wait and slow decline.
This painting, like others in Hersoid’s current show, leans heavily into that visual grammar of existential malaise. Across the exhibition, Hersoid has been building a lexicon of weary figures: bent, liminal, often caught mid-collapse. Where other works in the show play with more abstract voids or surreal architectures, this one is unusually direct. The chairs are chairs. The bodies are bodies. Yet something remains untethered—as if even the furniture can’t quite agree to reality. This grounding in the recognisable makes the bleeding pigment all the more violent—a wound not just in the body, but in the fabric of the social.
Literarily, there’s also a trace of Bruno Schulz here: the way the figures feel half-dreamt, slipping in and out of coherence. Schulz’s “sanatorium” logic applies—the idea of time folding inward, of characters condemned to loop through gestures that might once have meant something.
Hersoid’s genius here is that they don’t overplay it. The composition is spare. The background is blank. The colour is sparse but potent. The ambiguity is generous. This is storytelling in the syntax of silence, fatigue, and ink.
