<input> #2 with Hendrik Hegray, hosted by Julien Bécourt

"Hendrik Hegray is a self-publishing and graphzine artist who has mastered the art of associating ideas that are as trivial as they are outlandish. Ease, comfort and compromise are his immediate enemies. Over the years, Hegray has taken his pictorial practice into other realms, moving away from "contraband drawing" to improvise as a noisy performer, conceptual sculptor, achromatic painter, brutalist collagist, assembly-line photocopier, Italo disco DJ, experimental videographer or bulimic cinephile (note that he shares his initials with Howard Hawks, no doubt a sign of destiny). In a word, unclassifiable. A provocative agent in constant opposition to the world around him, he cultivates collisions of antinomic references whose sarcasm or outrageous bad taste elicits a form of cognitive dissonance: that which each and every one of us feels when confronted with the dejections of images and ideological polarities that flood our perceptive field and constrain our thinking.

Deliberately abstruse, Hegray's art never offers itself in the obviousness of a signifier, but constantly condemns itself to maximizing incongruity and inscribing impediment in its pictorial gestures, without ever yielding to the ease of expression or any kind of savoir-faire. Making a point of perplexing and disconcerting his audience, he constantly renews his creative process in a simultaneous gesture of destruction and edification, carelessness and rigor. Weary of the rhetoric of the times, Hegray persists in hitting where it hurts, where laughter becomes both discomfort and revolt. Yet his sense of the grotesque and the absurd does not prevent beauty and poetry from permeating his works, which seem to follow in the footsteps of both Philip Guston and Cy Twombly."

Julien Bécourt, May 2023

Born in 1981 in Limoges, Hendrik Hegray is represented by Valeria Cetraro Gallery. He took part in the Prix Fondation Ricard in 2014.

Replay of the meeting on Wednesday June 7, 2023