Photo : Pamela Berkovic
Charles Hascoët loves electronic music, Game Boys, his dog Simone, polar bears, and icebergs... Charles Hascoët is a painter, a DJ, a dreamer, and something of a poet.
His painting, instantly recognizable, lies at the crossroads of dream and autobiography. He draws on iconic films, 1990s pop culture, and childhood memories. Furby, Chewbacca, video games, Listerine bottles, dazzling yellow lemons, and legendary DJs all find their place in his compositions. These seemingly incongruous symbols slip into still lifes, domestic scenes, or dreamlike landscapes, forming fantastical worlds that are both familiar and surreal—his worlds.
And so, the work becomes autobiographical, even cathartic. He paints an alter ego immersed in an imaginary world—a refuge from the turbulence of reality. In this introspective space, each canvas becomes a way to understand himself, to tame the real, and at times, to escape it.
At this threshold between dream and reality, Hascoët cites Max Jacob: "All art is a lie, but good artists are not liars."
In his compositions, curves, objects, and gazes enter into dialogue—sometimes even confrontation—seeking a narrative and visual balance. His figures are languid, dozing, sometimes curled up. Hascoët explores form through play. He draws on Cubism, Mannerism, Italian painting, and the Northern Renaissance. He feeds on the richness of art history to create a synthesis of who he is—but also of who we are.
His painting is uniquely his own, and through it, he shares a personal vision of the contemporary world—not didactic, but full of sincere emotion, intuition, poetry, and a gentle gaze. Hascoët claims a figurative painting that is committed, personal, and narrative. He also likes to quote Robert Filliou: "Art makes life more interesting than art."
Since finishing his studies, Hascoët’s work has been exhibited both in France and internationally—in Brussels, New York, Miami, Shanghai, Paris, and in many independent spaces and art institutions. He was the subject of a solo show at Perrotin in New York, and has also exhibited at FRAC Corsica and the CAC in Noisy-Le-Sec. Whimsical and deeply sincere, Charles Hascoët continues to build, canvas after canvas, a body of work that is both intimate and universal—where memories become fictions, and fictions, mirrors.
Born in 1985 in Paris, Charles Hascoët is a French figurative painter who lives and works between New York and Paris. He graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2014, where he studied in the studios of James Rielly and Jean-Michel Alberola. Just as comfortable with a paintbrush as with turntables, Hascoët has also been a DJ since the early 2000s, driven by a passion for Detroit techno, the minimal electronic scenes of Paris and Berlin, as well as Italo disco. This dual culture—visual and sonic—gently infuses his paintings with a subtle musicality, capturing moments suspended between euphoria and silence.