Press Release | "Dystopia" by Hell'O Collective
First Amendment Gallery is very excited to announce “Dystopia” a debut US solo exhibition by Belgium duo Hell’O Collective in San Francisco, CA. The opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, November 2nd at 7pm. The exhibition with include new paintings, drawings, installation and exterior murals. The gallery is located at 1000 Howard St. in Downtown San Francisco. To receive a preview of the works in the exhibition contact info@firstamendmentgallery.com
Hell’O is an artistic duo composed of Jerôme Meynen and Antoine Detaille. They quickly left behind graffiti letters and spray paint in favor of paper, characters, ink drawings and paint, moving on to sculpture, installations and wall drawing. They developed a unique graphic vocabulary that is complex and ambiguous, which they continue to expand in the course of their creative output, customizing many recurrent elements, which they combine each time with new characters, or incorporate into unusual settings.
Through their creative approach, characterized by its extreme conventional freedom, as well as its rigorous execution, they produce a fertile, imaginary fantasy world, sometimes grotesque yet always poetic. A kind of strange fantastic bestiary, populated with enigmatic animals and vaguely human-looking, asexual creatures, with shapes and symbols drawn from the iconography of fairy tales, fables, and other medieval allegories, ancient and contemporary mythologies, but also vanities, esotericism and surrealism. Death, hope, failure, optimism, frivolity, animalism, cruelty, constraint and the desire to control are the most frequently addressed themes in the works of Hell’O.
Using brief narrative sequences, which are sometimes juxtaposed, and a healthy dose of humor and mockery, they rail against human foibles in compositions that combine metaphysical reflection and pure non sense, showcasing mystery and the free interpretation of the viewer. The art of Hell’O lies in the image of the name the duo has chosen for itself: both joyful and macabre, amusing and frightening, cutesy and brooding, morbid and seductive, absurd and meaningful...Oxymoron and dichotomy are key areas of their work, playing on duality, ambiguity and pretense, continually oscillating between attraction and repulsion and dissolving into chaos that is paradoxically highly structured.
