Hugo Canoilas: The prey learns to hunt and be devoured

I might write the history of my meetings with Hugo Canoilas just by recalling what we ate each time we were together. I don’t know why, but every time I met Hugo we ended up in front of tasty food, and often Hugo was the one who’d cooked those delicious dishes. For some reason, I perceive Hugo’s art practice as almost familiar, maybe because we share a lot of interests and we have a lot in common. For instance, we are both from the south of Europe, we both are football lovers, we like wines. Lastly ( but not marginally), we share a common idea of what art should be. I want to start with this note because even this time in Vienna, before going to visit Hugo’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Andreas Huber, I‘ll devour your eyes , we shared a nice Korean lunch and a long talk about Sporting Clube de Portugal, SSC Napoli football, and their respective technical and tactical evolution.
When we reached the gallery, after a walk in the city, I had my first surprise. Almost half of the exhibition space had been occupied by the site specific installation The black mass for hipsters club, with which Hugo transformed the floor of the first two rooms into a yellow, magmatic blob. He had changed the physical space of the gallery’s entrance in order to have a strong impact on any hypothetical visitor.

Hugo Canoilas, The black mass for hipsters club, 2016, silicone and paint on found objects, 70 x 700 x 1.300 cm. Courtesy Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna Photographer: Stefan Lux

At the very first, visitors may feel guilty stepping onto an art piece. But when they understand it is the only way to get into the show, a strange process of immersion seems to activate by itself. Even if the unconscious comes up at first (telling us to stop!), after a time the need arises to re-adapt our conscious attitude. The color, the intense yellow, almost blinds the viewer, but when one becomes familiar with the environment, the installation is allowed to reveal its complexity.
The title The black mass for hipsters club refers to Sun Ra, the African American jazz musician who claimed he was an alien from Saturn. The cosmo (or the cosmicity) in this case hides the “quotidian horrid fixity” that seems to lie under the synthetic mud made out of silicone and acrylic color. Hugo Canoilas has buried in there found objects, but also part of his past activity.
The black mass for hipsters club does not work as a time capsule, it does not preserve anything, because everything is contaminated there. The big installation allows the exhibition space to lose its “neutrality,” and suddenly it becomes a battle field. The blob almost invades the last part of the space, and even when the viewer leaves the site-specific installation behind, it still works as a live factor, influencing the general perception of the exhibition.

Hugo Canoilas. I’ll devour your eyes, exhibition view, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, Courtesy Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna Photographer: Stefan Lux

The two big paintings are not immune from this contamination process. Hugo Canoilas painted with ink on an unprimed canvas, obtaining transparent paintings as final result . The transparency is also a matter of intent. If it is true that each viewer can see through the canvas, visitors can recognize the imperfection of the process and the changes of mind of the painter.
Spider o big spider! Do you bring the cure spider? O spider, big spider, come and bite me, the big painting located in the middle room, is a conveyor of fragments – media fragments: film frames, animal parts, wings and insects, masks, drawings by the artist’s daughter. These fragments are reassembled into a flat layer, but they look like the final rendering obtained through a vectorial software.
Canoilas’ paintings are highly conceptual and often quite striking, but in this case they are also relatable, thanks to the environment and thanks to the surreal atmosphere in which the viewer is hosted.

Hugo Canoilas. I’ll devour your eyes, exhibition view, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, Courtesy Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna Photographer: Stefan Lux

The whole exhibition possesses the ability to build a cosmogony – an artistic belief – expressed through a contamination process. Hugo Canoilas offers us the chance to hunt inside the world of his fascinating practice. A number of stories are concealed and we (as viewers) feel their presence. The artist doesn’t reject – he entraps us in an abstract strategy game, a cosmology where we run the risk of being devoured. As in Canoilas’ quote from Oswald de Andrade: “Instead of rejecting the foreign, devouring the foreign.”

Hugo Canoilas, I’ll devour your eyes is at Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna through April 30, 2016

Hugo Canoilas, Spider o big spider! Do you bring the cure spider? O spider, big spider, come and bite me., 2016, ink on unprimed linen, 290 x 500 cm Courtesy Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna Photographer: Stefan Lux