Charles Hascoët

Presenting his most recent works, the exhibition represents a certain healing journey of the artist in the face of the sudden and the unexpected. Hascoët takes us on what seems to be a tennis court. But in the painter’s universe, there is nothing realistic about it: the clay floor is moving or even floating, the strings of the rackets are transformed into spider webs, and the protagonist, immersed in his thoughts, does not play. The scenes that the painter represents appear to us as visions, disparate motifs exist side by side. A way for the artist to take a certain distance with the sport discipline and to fully express the feelings that cross the player’s mind, associating the playing field to a prison.

Looking with great benevolence at Agassi’s history and adopting his appearance on certain portraits, Hascoët manages to express his own history through it: “I paint emotions above all and these take the form of situations or summary staging”. He evokes, in turn, his personal struggles, shares the loneliness of the player in his own practice and looks at his past events with a certain nostalgia. Embodied by totemic creatures like the octopus or the Furbys, always at his side, whose bright eyes always state hope in the face of melancholy.