BOOKS IN ATHENS / EXHIBITION IN MARSEILLE

Observer of the infra-ordinary and the anomalies extracted from his most immediate daily life, HH takes a side-long look at the things that surround him and testify to his existential condition.
Resulting images have an uncertain status, a landscape of ruins of the present time, the presence/absence of a world from which humans have been exiled. Truncated photographs, compulsive doodles or consumer objects from another time are erected to the status of the most disconcerting abstraction: snapshots of a concert of the noise-psychedelic group Skullflower (which gives its title to the exhibition at Salon du Salon), reorganized segments of an old Japanese bondage magazine, dusty display cases filmed in the Cairo Museum of Agriculture, the gloomy architecture of a suburban area, grotesque drawings or scans of wrapping paper… An art of disconnectedness and non-adaptation to the world, as if it was necessary to pass by the most radical otherness to reach the domain of the vision. A vision which does not pass any more only by the scopic impulse but by experience of a decadence, conjugating random accidents with the most rigorous formal decisions – even if, to the onlooker, their arbitrary role would escape them.

This sublimation of formlessness, coupled with an excess of absurdity bordering on sociopathy, HH accomplishes it almost with his eyes closed, groping in a nameless mess. A mess of obsessive, of the compulsive archiving, of the passion for the obscure, of the search for the missing image, of a poetry of the scrap. The needle in the haystack, the piece of untraceable puzzle without which the global view is as uncertain as undecidable – comes this effect of destabilization so sought after. It is by this tangent, this deliberate counter-sense, this active misdirection and inversion of the hierarchies that occur associations of ideas the most absurd: the entry in collision of cryptic references which the initiated seize with jubilation, but which befuddle all the more those who are unaware of the radically underground content of his former works. Photocopies of photocopies of photocopies which no longer filter anymore than streaks of color, geometric lines and snatches of S/M [removed] repressed, the irretrievable and the negativity are not only the agents of their neuroses – his, and those of a society irremediably sick – but reach a form of impure beauty, not impure, not homologated in the field of the art. From stratum to another occurs then an experience almost initiatory, whose ins would be deprived of outs. The mystery reigns, accompanied most often with a laughter which frees it of violence and social humiliation.

Because HH has always practiced a mocking humor, provoking incongruence to the point of arousing a form of fear or discomfort – nowadays we would say noawkwardness. There is in him the lucidity of an outsider conscious of seeing further, lost in a society to which he is at the same time stranger and receptive. He opposes a radical self-alienation, in attitude and in pictorial gesture. Radicality which consists in particular in restoring the most vulgar dross of the pop culture of the years 1980-1990 and the obsolete technologies in which his youth bathed to commute them in enigmatic totems or in waves of low-fi noise. Make capitalism' garbage can to extract the ready-made, what of more salvific?

As the years go by, Hendrik’s practice becomes more and more assertive and refined, more and more acute, more and more calculated in its casualness. Delicately disturbing, so to speak. His natural inclination for the grotesque would even tend to fade to a form of refinement. For nothing is left to chance in these falsely random arrangements that simulate chaos to better trigger perplexity. Between his self-publications, his latent sculptures, his sticky videos shot with a camcorder and his walls of photocopied collages, HH offers a formidable précis of aesthetic deviance from which emerges a new form, reconciling degenerate art and sophisticated avant-gardism.