In his first solo exhibition at New Galerie, Hoël Duret reconsiders his work on storytelling by exploring narrative processes that leans towards a deflated epic, a picaresque style filled with losers to adress our time.

The artist installed the core work of the exhibition, his latest video Outta Luck (2022), in the basement of the gallery. Three young people, slightly drunk, sitting on deckchairs, are talking about everything and nothing. They are outside, it’s night, the sky is clear - and even: “super weird”. As far as the eye can see, they are facing the immensity of the universe, but they don’t contemplate it. They talk about it, and what they show us is the complexity of making sense of their personal situation. Everything goes: fake news and post-truth, GAFAM and Bitcoins, solar system and universal love…

To extend the potential of mechanical chatter that the artist started to explore in his previous film, the feverish and glitched Drop Out (2020), Hoël Duret uses small talks dialogues here also. With digital and linguistic tricks, he confronts his characters to the deep mystery of existence. In the artist’s work, the language is visual and the situation of enunciation is constructed. In the previous opus, the actors expressed themselves through animal digital masks and the current one is still about collage. Behind our 3 characters, a long slow-mo sequence of collective dance-trance plays like a video clip on a forgotten (or perhaps obsolete) TV set.

On the ground floor, three screens adds some clues to the narrative that is going on. The scrolling texts punctuated with emojis, in the manner of a spammed karaoke or a Discord chat room, are taken from the 1930 opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny created by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil. It tells the story of the birth, the rise and the decline of the imaginary eponym city, build like a trap by three criminals to the Alaskan lumberjacks that they lure into their nets with prostitutes, alcohol and gambling. The predictable self-destruction of this libertarian paradise - like the natural slope of capitalism -, conveys for the artist the theses of accelerationism as they will emerge at the threshold of another decade in crisis, that of the 2010s.

According to the artist’s characteristic grammar, the exhibition Outta Luck gathers sculptures, paintings, videos, sound pieces… Hoël Duret aggregates artworks as parts of his narrative to build an environment that cultivates the ungrateful seeds of the present (Metaverse made sculptures, videoscreenlike paintings, NFTs). The soil of fiction may already be sterile, and the inspirational sky filled with celestial waste (Tesla guy’s cars?, the characters wonder), the humans who inhabit our contemporary world have no other choice but to cultivate their need for meaning.

The new philosophers of the Garden may be quite drunk, ataraxia remains visible on a clear day for those who want to see it.

01/21 - Outta Luck (2022), exhibition view
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

02/21 - 💨 (2022)
Acrylic lacquer and acrylic resin on canvas, aluminum stretcher.
112 x 64 x 2,5 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

03/21 - The next 🥃-🍾 (2022), video excerpt
HD video 1080p without sound, 0’39’’
© Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

04/21 - Outta Luck (2022), exhibition view
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

05/21 - Mahagonny (2022), video excerpt
HD video 1080p without sound 0’27’’
© Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

06/21 - 💭 (2022)
Acrylic lacquer and acrylic resin on canvas, aluminum stretcher.
112 x 64 x 2,5 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

07/21 - 👀 (2022)
Acrylic lacquer and acrylic resin on canvas, aluminum stretcher.
112 x 64 x 2,5 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

08/21 - Outta Luck (2022), exhibition view
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

09/21 - Ne 🥶❌ (2022), video excerpt
HD video 1080p without sound, 1’32’’
© Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

10/21 - 🌪 (2022)
Acrylic lacquer and acrylic resin on canvas, aluminum stretcher.
112 x 64 x 2,5 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

11/21 - ⛈ (2022)
Acrylic lacquer and acrylic resin on canvas, aluminum stretcher.
112 x 64 x 2,5 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

12/21 - Outta Luck (2022), exhibition view
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

13/21 - Innocent times part 01 (2020)
Blown glass, phosphorescent glass, light base, software.
51 x 33 x 33 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

14/21 - Innocent times part 03 (2020)
Blown glass, phosphorescent glass, demineralized water, light base, software.
44 x 33 x 33 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

15/21 - Innocent times part 04 (2020)
Blown glass, phosphorescent glass, demineralized water, light base, software.
39 x 33 x 33 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

16/21 - Outta Luck (2022), exhibition view
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

17 à 19/21 - Outta Luck (2022), video excerpt
4K video with sound, 13’47’’
© Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

20/21 - SKY© (2022)
LED strip, nylon tube, metal and wood bases.
Approx. 220 x 170 x 130
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022

21/21 - Cast your words (2020)
Casted glass, phosphorescent silicone, shell, chrome paint.
Approx. 27 x 70 x 50 cm
Image NEW GALERIE / Aurélien Mole, 2022 © Hoël Duret / ADAGP, Paris, 2022