A designer reinventing the shape of the egg, a journalist hanging about on a cruise liner, a retired mermaid telling her life story, or undersea cables mingling with jellyfish are all stories worked on by Hoël Duret. The early stages of these works are not in the form of sketches or photographs but rather notes and pieces of writing, often in great detail, like the conceptual artists of the 1960s. The story evolves gradually like pulp fiction, from a wide variety of origins and combinations that sometimes surprise. Indeed, the artist describes himself as a ‘sponge’, storing up references and not hesitating to resort to humour in his practice that at first sight seems very serious. The play on references is one of the great issues in the history of contemporary art. The study of figurative representation, that is, iconography, and a catalogue of subjects implicitly judged acceptable have for a long time encouraged certain forms and directed the signifiers in works. These hierarchies have now given way to a welcome horizontality, leading the spectator to a constant sensory and intellectual investigation. And with good reason, as the catalogue of stories available has boomed, whereas the formal codes have simply been annihilated. That is why the contemporary spectator finds they are denied references, drowning in a profusion of possibilities. How can they understand and analyze the work without the contexts and paradigms from which it is constituted? Hoël Duret gets around this thorny problem by weaving his own stories, inspired by reality, yes, but nevertheless constructed by following a clear and totally new narrative. Invention and (implicit) pedagogy construct the corpus of the artist who amuses himself by sprinkling clues throughout series, or rather groups of works gravitating around a common story. With Hoël Duret, research time becomes reading time, either physical or digital, with the artist foraging for various different elements to feed into a story that is vast yet readable and intelligible. His great model, David Foster Wallace, pushed back the limits of what was known as literary postmodernism by inventing a new kind of comedy. Just as the writer was capable of writing just as well about tennis player Roger Federer, filmmaker David Lynch and politician John McCain, Hoël Duret adopts the same chameleon-like approach, juggling with specific themes and subjects that might appear unrelated to anyone who does not go beyond the surface.

The early works of Hoël Duret reveal a fascination with the do-it-yourself aesthetic. This attitude - the idea of being able to do everything yourself together with a taste for amateurism in the noble sense of the word - still holds true today. It is far from pure chance that the first works collated by the artist are two videos from 2011 and 2012 focussing on the codes of DIY tutorials and how to dismantle a jigsaw step by step, which had become the symbol of a new twentieth-century hobby. By tackling this world of making do, Hoël Duret was exploring a political story, the comprehension and appropriation of one’s environment by building things. This hobby is that of capitalism par excellence: building more and more objects that are ephemeral and disposable, being produced for better or worse by weekend ‘workmen’. By very logically venturing into the do-it-yourself field, Hoël Duret would have to look at the history of design and remind us that all aesthetics support political projects. After reading the autobiography of the designer Raymond Loewy entitled Never Leave Well Enough Alone, translated into French with the title ‘La Laideur se vend mal’ (Ugliness is a hard sell) – a statement in itself –, Hoël Duret produced La Vie Héroïque de B.S. - un opéra en 3 actes (=he Heroic Life of B.S. - an opera in three acts) (2013-2015) which illustrated this whole area of research. In this video, the protagonist BS, loosely based on Brooks Stevens, an American designer famous for creating the idea of planned obsolescence - “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary” he declared in 1954 - set about rethinking the shape of the egg, a shape that was however already perfect. The absurd idea of establishing a model for the mass production of billions of units, which is, of course, already the case, with a ‘natural’ shape. The world of B.S. is pop, flashy, very ‘60s, American and stereotypical. The film is conceived like an opera, divided into acts, thereby increasing the grandiloquence of the subject which takes on an air of tragedy. The choice of composition for the stories is equally revealing, with the artist using very specific genres such as opera, television series or spin-offs. The heroic life of B.S. is an essential landmark in constructing the practice of Hoël Duret. This video is a bank of stories mixing the aesthetics of science popularized for broadcast, the sets of Hollywood studios, and popular series such as Mad Men while taking a critical view of what seems to pass for fascination; BS happens to be used in English to mean ‘bullshit’.

Although the film of BS made reference to the peak of our consumer system, the artist was not seeking to see the past as a glorious era, and avoided any feeling of attachment to it. The body of works later developed by the artist are resolutely turned towards the contemporary world. In the video UC-98 Decompression (2016), the life story of a retired mermaid in a theme park has been set alongside an evocation in dance of a technological undersea world. Apart from a taste for strange and eccentric characters, the overall artistic project, of which the video is only a part, reveals a poetic fiction described by the artist as follows: “UC-98 is the name of a submarine fibre optic cable carrying our digital data. In one of the curls of the cable, a shoal of jellyfish have made their home, their presence damaging the sheathing and creating a leak of light data into the depths of the ocean. The beam of light released passes continuously through the soft, gelatinous and translucent bodies of the cnidarians, feeding them the information it is carrying.” We understand, the works of Hoël Duret act as a network where different mediums intersect and influence each other. Like a collage, the artist links aqueous elements with formal and conceptual abstraction, influenced by the theory of liquid societies of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who explained that society has become liquid because the links between humans, driven by their acts of consumption, have become impossible. Somewhere between a metaphor of this world and formal games, these paintings arising from that fluid fiction are soft, recalling the famous fourth dimension of comics. The lamp sculptures made of plastic bags and electric garlands continue the artist’s investigations into do-it- yourself and in some way evoke some of the assemblages of Richard Tuttle. Although in the Vie Héroïque de B.S. some objects still had an indefinite status, between props and a work, the UC-98 project lays the basis for a ground-breaking global corpus.

The artist’s most recent project, LOW, currently the subject of an exhibition at Villa Merkel at Esslingen in Germany, continues this dichotomy between committed art, acerbically observing its time, and formal seduction. The film at the heart of this new opus, Drop Out (2020), was classified as ‘climate fiction’ - a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change - and explores the possibility of catastrophe without sensationalism. Whereas in the past over-consumption was an underlying theme in Hoël Duret’s work, his new story ventures boldly forth as a militant tale somewhere between class warfare and ecological commitment. The film was made in New Zealand and shows grandiose landscapes, infested by architectural shapes evoking the bunkers of wealthy survivalists planning their survival and our disappearance. Using, as he often does, absurd and grotesque resources, Hoël Duret inserts Instagram filters like new masks over reality, transforming students and himself into animals that are half-cute and half-terrifying. As in Animal Farm, A Fairy Story by George Orwell, the film turns into dystopia and the speech by the main character in the fable, Old Major the pig, denouncing human predation, resounds with irony as it did in 1945: “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”.