Hell’O Monsters
When Antoine Detaille (left), Jerôme Meynen (right) and François Dieltiens met in the late 90s, they preferred spray paint and walls to ink and canvas. But that all changed when they formed Hell’O Monsters, a collective specializing in imaginative, visually stunning fantasy worlds that are equal parts poetic, surreal, grotesque, hilarious and nonsensical. They sat down with Sean Hebert to discuss their first exhibition in Hong Kong.
HK Magazine: How did you three first meet?
Jerôme Meynen: We were all doing graffiti art in 2000, and we met on the walls. Because we had close styles, we became friends quickly. We collaborated for maybe three or four years before we thought about working on paper, and making something more concrete that could work in a gallery. We still do work with cans, but now it’s much more with the brush.
HK: Why the change?
Antoine Detaille: We wanted to make art our job. When we wake up in the morning now, we go to the studio to do our sculpture, drawing or painting. It’s been 10 years, and the biggest difference is the work now needs more reflection and should have meaning. Behind every project now there is an exhibition. It’s always a pleasure to draw, but we no longer draw just for the pleasure—there is always something to work toward.
HK: Your exhibition—“ModernGhosts3”—debuted in the midst of Ghost Month in Hong Kong. Were you aware of this before arriving?
JM: No, we weren’t, and we learned that ghosts have a totally different weight here than we are used to. In Belgium, ghosts are imaginary—they are mostly for scaring kids. It’s not normally talked about. But here, people believe in it. They speak about ghosts being everywhere around you, and say they will catch you. It’s interesting, but I don’t think people will see their ghost stories in our drawings. The ghost is more of a figure that we use in our symbology.
HK: There is so much going on in your paintings, and it almost seems like you are depicting a fully formed universe from in your heads. What influenced this style?
AD: We are probably inspired most—sometimes unconsciously—by Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but we also draw a lot from the Memphis movement from Italy, and the tradition of optical art. We try to mix in a lot of references, too, but they are very open—there are important things and whimsical things. Like, we could mix something funny like “Where’s Wally” with something inspired by history or meteorology: the ambiguity between the things is most important.
JM: With all of our work, you can see hidden details if you search for them. You can look for one hour and keep finding new things, so with every drawing we do, we always take pleasure in looking at it again when it’s in the gallery to remember what was happening when we drew each piece.
