Studio Visit: Hell'o Monsters

Take a bite from the apple and you’re hooked... Strange enticements populate the garden of earthly delights that the Brussels-based collective Hell’o Monsters maintains so meticulously. Grotesque, terrible, and magical creatures come tumbling out of the trio’s imaginative heads. And we, in our turn, fall headlong into a hungry, fathomless pit, astonished, bewildered, and horrified. But pleasantly tormented by the sensations that overload our narrative senses.

The bunker in Anderlecht where Jérôme Meynen, François Dieltiens, and Antoine Detaille subject their monstrous characters to genetic manipulation is on the first, studio-filled floor at the back of a large town house. The restlessness that characterises their creations is kept under control at three separate tables. With steady hands, and VHS cases for palettes, they masterfully control their compositions, which are characterised by clear lines, careful attention to detail, and patient balance. What’s more, they display a stunning visual unity that could only have ripened over many years. “We always make our drawings separately, and then make the compositions together.

After twelve years of working together, our work has become increasingly homogenous. If you didn’t know the collective, you could hardly guess that there were three members. Over the years, that has become a more deliberate and thought-through approach: you can create new interpretations of the work by obscuring who did what.” The resistance of Hell’o Monsters’s work to a definitive interpretation is closely related to the multiple identities their name refers to. “Our styles are similar, but our interests are not. We each have different ideas and we let them clash with one another. Our work is thus somewhat like an exquisite corpse, which ultimately presents one final result. The work is by one person, but executed by three people. We’re like a band with a drummer, a guitarist, and a singer who write one song all together. Hell’o Monsters is a complete and natural fusion of technique, but also of a mind frame about art and creation in general.”

The fusion remains varied enough. Combine Borges’s fantastic, open mind, Marko Turunen’s lethally efficient humour, Charles Burns’s fathomless depth, Hieronymus Bosch’s eye for hybrid and detail, Escher’s illusions, and Maurice Sendak’s young, refined brutality, and you might get something close to what the three guys in Hell’o Monsters bring to life on paper. Their spirited Everymen are headless hominids, worms held together by ripping skin, terrifying mongrels with beaks or fins born of the violent confrontation between man and animal, doomed creatures who cannot relinquish their desires, and monsters born in the depths of fear and despair. Their universe is the world turned on its morbid head. Yet our shackled eye is doomed to stare at terrifyingly recognisable things.

Hell’o Monsters’s work is saturated with transience, the inevitability of destruction, but at the same time, it resists sombreness. “Precisely. We impose no limitations whatsoever. We treat both serious subjects, as well as the utterly inane. This ambiguity between the uplifting and the serious – this polarity – is a recurring theme.” Their exhibition "Memento Mori" (literally: “always remember that you must die”) at ALICE Gallery was an explicit celebration of the human condition, but also appeared to be inclined to jollity; to the antidote of a macabre dance. The playfulness of their exhibitions is further underscored by their habit of avoiding classic hangings. Their drawings result in tangible volumes, their paint spills out of the frame. “We have a lot to say! When we see white walls, we bring out the paint!” (Laughter)

Hell’o Monsters’s stories aren’t told from left to right, but fall, either straight down or criss-cross down black and white, Escher-like labyrinthine staircases. Their creatures descend to the depths. Whether they are balancing in mid-air on a tightrope, or are stuck in an indefinable mire, submersion is unavoidable. The compositions sink increasingly deeper in their detail, shed their skin, mutate, and regenerate.
The sense of alienation that overwhelms you sprouts from the paradoxical harmony of a soft tonal palette and disturbing themes, of a radically different whole made up of easily recognisable parts. “In the beginning, we used lots of flashy colours, many of them mixed. We then switched to black and white for a long time, and then a few years ago, we started using colour again, but in a much more calculated way. We now prefer more neutral, softer colours. But we also like things that are visceral, even morbid. That relationship between colour and subject, and technique and content, is occasionally unsettling. Everything is part of that polarity. It is the cement of our work and our mind-set.”

The ambiguity creates an interesting tension, great freedom, and mobility, but must always be viewed with a wary eye, as the title of their recent exhibition in Valencia, "Two Sticks and a Cross Are Easily Confused", implies. “We often turn symbolism on its head, or use it indirectly. We sometimes deconsecrate ideas completely, or strip them of their symbolic value. It also entirely depends on the day and on our mood. Everything that happens around us finds its way into our work. Looking back, it is like the diary of a particular period. It might be about something very distant, or exactly the opposite, about something extremely personal. In other words, the symbolism is sometimes less weighty than it seems… Or much weightier. Sometimes it is best to distrust the symbols. So take care! (Laughter)
“It’s all in your mind,” says one of the walls the trio once painted in Valencia. They’re probably right. But we’re already hooked on the apples. Completely hooked!

Borough: Anderlecht
Exhibitions: Two Sticks and a Cross Are Easily Confused, 4/5 > 23/6, Gallery Espai Tactel, Valencia; Memento Mori, 8/3 > 6/4, Alice Gallery, Brussels; The End of Magic, 28/10 > 26/11/2011, MOHS exhibit, Copenhagen
In the near future: Another Brick in the Hole, 7/9 > 27/10, Alley Art Gallery, Hasselt,
www.alley.be; Modern Ghosts, 13/10 > 11/11, Le lieu unique, Nantes, www.lelieuunique.com
Info: hellomonsters.wordpress.com

Photos © Heleen Rodiers