Hell'O

Rue de la Halle, 5 - 7000 Mons

Hell'O is a duo of Belgian artists, Jérôme Meynen and Antoine Detaille. Coming from a graffiti background, they have left behind lettering and spray cans for paper, paint, ink drawings and installations. Together, the two artists evolve within a rich and intriguing graphic universe, which is constantly developing, multiplying references. Strange animals, small characters and asexual creatures recall the fantastic world of fables and fairy tales. Their compositions also evoke a surreal, dreamlike, mysterious and disturbing world, with themes such as cruelty, optimism, failure, hope and death. The work of this artist duo has been the subject of nearly twenty solo exhibitions, including one in 2018 at BAM (Beaux-Arts Mons), and some thirty group exhibitions in Spain, Belgium, the United States, France and China, among others. This group of artists from Mons see themselves first and foremost as muralists, who use the wall as a canvas. More precisely, their artistic approach lies on the border between street expression and the extension of the museum's picture rails, and this is where their originality lies. Passionate about motifs, Gangolphe works with textures and materials, incorporating textile prints, wallpaper and mosaics into her work. She uses drawing, painting and collage to create fragile, sensitive images that can find a place in the public space. For her, it's always a question of adapting to a place and the people who live there, while trying to create a universe that engages and tells a story. Clearly, she likes to set up street scenes and place imaginary characters, often half-man half-woman, wearing colourful patterns reminiscent of textile prints and wallpaper.

There's no doubt that this is an optimistic, positive work, from which emanates something extremely soothing and introspective, a feeling we get when confronted with this fresco, which is nevertheless fragmented into 16 rigorously identical squares, with no imposed reading direction: ‘The wall and its sixteen independent supports are worked on,’ explain the two artists, ‘in such a way as to take the viewer on a journey through time and different styles: figuration, abstraction, references to time, modernism, classicism...’. Faced with this car park architecture, they fully respect the diversity of plans and materials. They just emphasise a square rhythm in the façade, which they fill with 16 coloured planes, all in finesse and in harmony with the architecture. The unity of the 16 frescoes is expressed, on the one hand, in the chromaticism of the harmonious, synthetic pastel tones; and on the other, in the fragile, light and graphic technique of the drawings. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note particularities in the way the characters are stylised, such as the asexual body that stretches out without any volume; sometimes the characters are limited to a head or two legs that stretch out in the shape of a shoelace.

In other, more abstract squares, the vanishing lines evaporate into space without ever asserting a background in relation to a foreground; the flat, harmonious colours confirm the mural dimension. Finally, in this 16-panel composition, only two of the panels are identical, grouped together side by side as if to form a stare from two stylised eyes placed in the middle of the architecture. The eye is an essential graphic element in their work, and over the years it has become central to most of their work. This fresco in Montpellier is no exception. In their view, the eye is the representation of the living being in its simplest form, self-sufficient in itself - there's no need for a body or a head, only the eye. As for temporality, it is fluidised here in these semi-figurative organic forms that stretch and organise themselves on the surfaces without rupture, force or tension; just a visual extension that asserts itself on the flatness of the surface, refusing any illusionist effect of depth or mimetic rendering of reality, instead offering the eye a timeless meditative repose.

L'art habite la Ville