The Imagined Futures of Alex Andreev

Alex Andreev is a Russian artist. He calls his style "hermetic," and while I'm not sure what that means exactly, his work is certainly compelling. Many of his paintings -- computer-aided, I assume -- seem to imagine this very specific urban future, in which humanity has adapted to a new life in the clouds after having more or less ruined, then abandoned, the ground. For instance, here are a cluster of skyscraping apartments, at once desolate and whimsical:

... though a few bottom-dwellers still scrape by in shantytowns below the clouds: