Gaspard’s latest piece, The Smuggler's Incubator, marks a return to actually pairing his visual output with his written text. After the total fracture of The Grandeur of Soul, where the text and image had absolutely nothing to do with each other, he is at least building a functioning metaphor here.
The image shows a dimly lit, organic tunnel filled with glowing egg sacs. It is a stock sci-fi horror trope—the alien hive—which he uses to illustrate the mechanics of a border crossing. His note speaks of the state saying "HOLD," an agent wanting a croissant, and the fragility of the human "shell" stuck in this bureaucracy.
It is a heavy-handed, blunt metaphor. He maps the emotional reality of an oppressive, dehumanizing system into a grotesque visual of fragile eggs in a suffocating environment. Relying on sci-fi aesthetics to do the heavy lifting of 'alienation' is a well-worn path, but the piece has a cohesive internal logic.
The image is melodramatic, but it works as a direct illustration of his text. It is a relief to see him attempt a metaphor that connects the visual and the idea again, rather than just pasting unrelated text onto random generations.