Frederique Emprou
“Hippolyte Hentgen Portrait of the artist as a troubled figure”

HH, portrait of the artist as a troubled figure

For more than fifteen years now, Hippolyte Hentgen has been constantly drawing on a reservoir of imagery, iconography, and collages, developing expanded and constantly redefined versions of his drawing practice. A meeting and reunion of Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen, Hippolyte Hentgen is at once a Siamese workshop, an entity, and a four-handed production unit. A fictional creature with a blurred and ambiguous identity, playing on neutrality and plurality, blurring the lines between the notions of author and authoress, Hippolyte Hentgen sees itself as a laboratory of forms that stands out for its expansive, nomadic, empirical, and intuitive approach to the field of drawing. Reflecting the proliferating nature of their representations, the duo’s productions combine grafts, shifts, and other delightful collisions that contribute to a vast baroque upcycling, revisiting an iconic repertoire ranging from popular culture to art history, from cartoons to modernism, from underground to folk aesthetics. A way of investigating the question of registers, a historiography of signs and their mass industrialization, the works of the two artists combine the horizontality of sources and creations, against a backdrop of updating styles and their multiple variations, through murals, performances, installations, and more.

Following their residency in Paradise, Hippolyte Hentgen presents the exhibition Bleue vapeur, in the style of a fantastical and polymorphous emanation. Always defined as a place of transition, transformation, and experimentation for the duo, the idea of the studio takes on the context, form, and contours of organic and material treatment and translation. Corresponding to the constant sampling and exploration of different states of the image, Hippolyte Hentgen’s large painted canvases and collages are presented here in the manner of dreamlike screens, between photography and photograms, through the use of stencil and airbrush techniques. Charms and objects, plants collected during their residency, as well as the bodies of the two artists, become the supports, traces, and elements for two-dimensional transfers and montages. Playing with scale using light and pastel colors, assembling shots within the frame, Bleue vapeur is arranged against the diffuse backdrop of a vast drawing on the gallery walls, blending mist and paint vapors.

Haunting the black-and-white space, the vegetation, the statuary, and the anatomical lines of the two model artists continue to proceed through effects of contamination and appearance, transparency and superimposition in the film Vapori Grigi. Deliberately spectral, somewhat reminiscent of Cocteau’s Orphée, while borrowing certain codes from New American cinema, or camp cinema, in the experimental happening vein, the film, shot in Rome last year, mixes ornamental compositions and graphic textures according to a heterogeneous sequence shot: with the Villa Medicis, its gardens and sculptures as a backdrop, Hippolyte Hentgen’s figures are imprinted in cameo on floral motifs and the curves of ancient statues, which are then caressed by hands… Against a backdrop of synth loops, a nod to the music of Maurizio Bianchi, the distorting echoes of the noise soundtrack, composed by Paul Bonnet, echo the visual drift and anthropomorphic interplay between poses and gestures, perspectives and volumes. Vapori Grigi is a non-programmatic mise-en-scène of living matter, which becomes a generalized tableau.

In “A Feast for Open Eyes,” ¹ the first article discussing Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures, Susan Sontag talks about joy and what she describes as the ingenuity and innocence of the moving bodies that emerge from it. At the crossroads of practice and pleasure, and following the example of the American artist’s legendary work, a sort of chromatic or black-and-white “steaming creatures,” Hippolyte Hentgen’s exhibition Bleue vapeur (Blue Steam) weaves a web of plastic and intimate sisterhood, which is revealed through the hanging and mise en abyme, the scrolling and animated images, and stages the silhouettes of the two artists, like a sensitive, double, ghostly signature.

Frederique Emprou
2021