Good men

"When looking through the work of Didier Hamey, populated by hybrid and joyful beings maintaining in perfect harmony relationships that are, to say the least, ambiguous, the triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (1453-1516) quickly comes to mind. This masterful work continues to be debated and we are still trying to decipher the details of the intentions of the painter who represents an imaginary world teeming with characters whose unusual attitudes have nothing in common with an ordinary earthly life. (…) Didier Hamey's work does not illustrate a world, it forms a world…"

according to Paul Ripoche

The 'Bonshommes' are a series - still in progress - of around fifty drypoint engravings begun at the Casa de Velasquez in Madrid around the rock carnivals of the Spanish Basque country. 

Together, they form a bestiary of hybrid, fantastical and mysterious figures, in osmosis with Nature and the landscape. Furry and feathered, animal and plant, Boûfadou, Omsô and their companions bear witness to the wild and teeming worlds as they certainly were in those distant times forgotten by man. 

Nesting between humus and canopy, between shadow and light, charming and frightful, this people of tales draws on the imagination of our childhood and laughingly gives it new vigor...