New expanded edition featuring 75 drawings/watercolors by Sigismond de Vajay.
Nouveaux Désastres "Expanded" (after the first edition having been sold out for many years) brings together 75 drawings/watercolors by Sigismond de Vajay. The first 63 were produced between 2008 and 2009 for the exhibition presented at Zavaleta Lab Gallery in Buenos Aires, and 12 new works are from 2026 specifically to enrich this new edition.
This version, also designed by Paula Galli, preserves the original aspects of the first edition as well as the "côté boutique," which contrasts beautifully with the theme. The beauty of an airplane in flames crossing the sky, the startling second of silence before the collapse of a building, the somber splendor of a voracious fire or an erupting volcano with its columns of smoke: dreadful yet riveting scenes of death and destruction—our small everyday apocalypses. Through the work of Sigismond de Vajay, we contemplate the devastation of matter, the deadly phallic drive of large missiles, the collapse of technology and its will to dominate the world. What could be a sensationalist and morbid exhibition becomes instead a subtle and moving experience. Vajay's delicate watercolors convey a healthy sarcasm that goes beyond the pessimistic campaign of fear orchestrated by the media. These new "Nouveaux Désastres" reveal the symphonic beauty of the destruction of all things, without overlooking the unavoidable environmental impact caused by humankind and its oversized toys. As Werner Herzog stated, "The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor."
This new edition includes a prologue and an epilogue by Pedro Donoso A. translated in English, Spanish, French, and Japanese.
Sigismond de Vajay is a protean artist, curator and publisher, Argentinian, Hungarian and Swiss, born in Paris (1972). He worked in Vevey, Barcelona and New York, where he studied at the SVA. Since 2009 he lives in Buenos Aires. His works include installations, drawings, videos, interventions in the public space and sculptures. In 2002 he moved to Barcelona, where he set up with a collective a platform for contemporary art, KBB (Kültur Büro Barcelona). He develops important projects for galleries, museums and institutions in Switzerland, France, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Brazil.
His work highlights the systems that govern the planet, irregularities and social differences, power and global control. With a disenchanted look, his art oscillates ceaselessly between the human and the machine, the individual and the mass, or even nature and technology. His productions have in common a dystopian aesthetic with which he describes the condition of contemporary societies in the state of ruin.
