CHARLES HASCOËT: KOBAYASHI MARU
Perrotin presents Kobayashi Mary, by the artist Charles Hascoët. . Imbued with nostalgia and introspection, his colorful self-portraits place him within pop culture's embrace.
June 1 - July 26, 2024
For New York-based Parisian artist Charles Hascoët, the unisex CK One elicits olfactory memories of hope and innocence. In his debut solo show at Perrotin New York, Kobayashi Maru, Hascoët presents Giorgio Morandi-like still lifes featuring frosted glass flasks of CK One, colorful barbellshaped Listerine bottles, and other curios that are unmistakably of an era and its sensual pleasures promised by the famous motto of “Purity. Unity. Sensuality.”
Hascoët was raised in Paris and classically trained in painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, from which he graduated in 2014, a school known for its traditional, rigorous approach. He belongs to a generation of artists—perhaps one of the last—whose fine art education was realized through in-person art critiques and studio visits, with work shared and viewed up close.
The titular piece of the show, Kobayashi Maru (2024) portrays the artist in royal blue pajamas waking up from a nightmare with his bed-as-raft half on ocean water and half on shore, while in the distance an active volcano rages. There is danger, yes, but also escape and diversion, a tension found throughout this new body of work.
Schnapf’s ongoing interest in the psychological resonance of abstract space is evident in his attention to compositional weight. In Sauna, for example, he harnesses the triangular arrangement of subjects to impart a sense of stability, while the downward motion of the embracing figures evokes feelings of vulnerability, protection, and warmth.
Hascoët approaches painting—as he described to me during a visit to his Bushwick studio in late March—sculpturally. (Unsurprisingly, he began his artistic life as a sculptor.) For the artist, this means that he understands his oil paintings as masses that occupy space, and he forms tableaux that challenge two dimensionality by positioning objects and figures in unexpected and iconoclastic ways.
Hascoët’s imaginary worlds seem to reflect our uncomfortable contemporary moment that is plagued by isolation, irrevocable environmental destruction, doomsday spirals, and collective and generalized anxiety. Yet Hascoët’s fantastical utopian scapes and escapes are rendered with much humor and nostalgia.