"Désir d’une femme pour un homme" - poèmes futiles can be read as an intimate conversation between a man and a woman in words and images. It is also a collection of poems and drawings that began, strangely enough, with a fashion story. In the hand of Mathias Augustyniak, one half of the design duo M/M Paris, drawing is a powerful and introspective tool—a link between hidden worlds. As a creative director, he often employs drawing to bring out the hidden messages in photography. In the case of “Libertine,” a subliminally erotic fashion story by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Augustyniak’s subconscious caught up with him, ultimately leading him on a thirteen-day journey of the mind and the soul.

The sexually explicit yet playfully child like drawings gathered here, track the path of that journey—a very personal, though not solitary or self-centered experience. Augustyniak, in turn, passed the drawings on to the French novelist Stéphanie Cohen and commissioned these to accompanying poems. The spare, enigmatic, and highly charged poems, published in both French and English, stand as bodies of work all their own. The drawings don’t necessarily illustrate the poems, just as the poems don’t necessarily clarify the drawings. The two are in conversation and sometimes even contradiction.