Vincent Broquaire

With his distinctive, deceptively simple style of ink drawings, Vincent Broquaire finds moments of humor and poignancy in the everyday. In his clean, small-scale works on paper, a cast of tiny humans inhabit a world at once flat and minimalist, yet easily recognizable as our own for the foibles and idiosyncrasies encountered there. Expanding his illustrations into further dimensions, Broquaire has more recently turned to producing books and, most notably, animations, which bring to life witty takes on technology and man’s incursion into nature. In one video, construction equipment relocates an island in the middle of the ocean, while others depict whimsical scenes of his characters draining lakes or struggling with computers. “We live in an age where very little of nature has not been touched by man, and technology is effectively an extension of our bodies and mind,” he says. “Is it not time to question the inherited oppositions of man versus nature, man versus the machine, and even the physical versus the virtual?” In all media, Broquaire emphasizes the importance of sequence and juxtaposition as a means of exploring his fraught subject matter.