To hold in your hands what the artist Peer Kriesel touched while creating his captivating “Surreal Visions”—a series of 50 editions—is a rare opportunity to experience the essence of artistic creation. This Moleskine sketchbook is not only the origin of a remarkable edition with over 50 pages full of finely hand-drawn details, but also a window into the creative process of a contemporary Surrealist.
Peer Kriesel, born in Berlin in 1979, engages intensively in his work with “identity and values in the age of digital transformation.” His “Surreal Visions” are more than just images—they are reflections of our digitized society, visualized through the prism of Surrealism.
Surrealism, an art movement that emerged in the 1920s, aimed to liberate the unconscious and dissolve the boundaries between dream and reality. In Kriesel’s work, this tradition finds a contemporary continuation. His “faces,” which run like a common thread through his oeuvre, recall the distorted figures in Salvador Dalí’s paintings or the enigmatic characters in Yves Tanguy’s works.
Interestingly, a connection can be drawn between Kriesel’s work and the Surrealist card game “Jeu de Marseille.” This tarot-like deck, created in exile in 1940–41 by André Breton and other Surrealists, replaced traditional card symbols with Surrealist motifs. Inspired by this concept, Kriesel developed the idea of designing his own tarot deck. His Moleskine sketchbook was intended to serve as a rich repository of figures, symbols, and archetypes that reflect the peculiarities of our digital era.
In Kriesel’s sketchbook, a world is revealed in which absurdly quirky faces and masks, drawn with fine lines, take center stage. These figures are not only aesthetically fascinating, but also function as a distorting mirror of the growing masquerade in our social media–shaped society. They embody the tension between authentic identity and digital self-presentation—in an age of AI and the question of what distinguishes humans from machines.
The Moleskine sketchbook is more than a mere container for drawings—it is an artifact of the creative process. Like a diary, each page holds the possibility of tracing the artist’s train of thought and emotional world. It is a testament to the drawing frenzy and meditative spirit of experimentation that characterize Kriesel’s work.
Surreal Visions Tarot is a complete 78-card tarot and oracle deck born directly from one sketchbook filled with intricate black-and-white drawings. This Kickstarter campaign exists to turn that intimate, hand-drawn world – a visual diary of identity and values in the age of digital change – into a finely crafted object you can hold, read with, collect and live with.
