Hello Monsters

Hello Monsters collective emerged in the late 1990s as a result of the meeting between Jerôme Meynen, François Dieltiens and Antoine Detaille. Hello Monsters quickly left behind wall art, graffiti letters and spray paint in favour of paper, characters, ink drawings and paint, moving on to sculpture, installations and wall drawing. Hello Monsters developed a unique graphic vocabulary that is complex and ambiguous, which they continue to expand in the course of their creative output, customising many recurrent elements, which they combine each time with new characters, or incorporate into unusual settings.

Through their creative approach, characterised by its extreme conventional freedom, as well as its rigorous execution, Hello Monsters 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 Hello Monsters.

Using brief narrative sequences, which are sometimes juxtaposed, and a healthy dose of humour and mockery, Hello Monsters 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 Hello Monsters lies in the image of the name the collective 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 pretence, continually oscillating between attraction and repulsion and dissolving into chaos that is paradoxically highly structured.