Charles Hascoët

Charles Hascoët loves electronic music, Game Boys, his dog Simone, polar bears, and icebergs... Charles Hascoët is a painter, DJ, dreamer, and bit of a poet. He is exhibiting for the first time at the Danysz Gallery.

At the crossroads of dream and autobiography, Glitch, far from being a simple anomaly, is here claimed as a poetics of the unexpected, a moment when the system cracks to allow a new form to emerge. Charles Hascoët invites us to step through the looking glass of a painting where personal narrative replaces factual reality. In this hybrid world, the most trivial everyday occurrences take on a fantastical aura filled with mystery. Charles Hascoët composes his canvases like emotional landscapes in which love and tenderness serve as a moral compass.

Charles Hascoët’s aesthetic references iconic films and series from Ghost Dog to The X-Files, 1990s pop culture, and his childhood memories filled with Game Boys and pet-like Furbys. With the enthusiasm of a teenager, the artist explores territories populated by flying saucers, aliens, and dinosaurs.

“Glitch brings together tender ideas and possibilities that touch on the very heart of ‘principle of hope’.”

—Charles Hascoët

Charles Hascoët’s work is autobiographical, even cathartic. He paints an alter ego immersed in an imaginary world, a refuge from the turmoil of the surface world. In this introspective dimension, each canvas becomes an attempt to understand oneself, to tame reality, and sometimes to escape it. The painter replaces reality with a personal narrative, an intimate territory nourished by memories, sensations, and images that have shaped his relationship with the world.

Under the brush of an artist who has mastered all the subtleties of oil painting, his unexpected models, strange objects or figures, become the noble subjects of his paintings. Charles Hascoët elevates the polar bear, the Labubu, and the colourful Furby to iconic status. He thus taps into a universal form of cuteness that will soon take him to the Louvre-Lens Museum, where he is one of Annabelle Tenèze’s guests for the Trop Mignon exhibition.

This exhibition is part of the Danysz Gallery’s ongoing commitment to artists who explore the cultural and social changes of our time through hybrid and socially engaged practices. Charles Hascoët never seeks to comment on or analyse society. His approach is above all emotional, autobiographical, and disarmingly sincere. Each canvas acts as a fragment of a personal narrative, an attempt to capture a persistent feeling, something that preoccupies and inhabits him, without seeking to rationalize it. Charles Hascoët shares with us his deep feeling that “the man who dreams cannot grow old”.