[open the box] Hugo Canoilas

A white trapezium stands out against a background. Is it a rectangle? One can’t make it out clearly, because the deviation in relation to the parallel of the edges of the rectangle, if it is one, is too subtle to make the geometry of the forms clear.

Hugo Canoilas’s painting starts from a founding moment in 20th century painting: it starts from Malevich and Suprematism, from the Russian adventure of the first three decades of the 20th century, from Rodschenko’s first monochrome paintings, from the relationship between the two-dimensional space of the image and the three-dimensional aspect of Lazar Lissitzky’s real space.

It starts at the beginning of the radical nature of an approach to painting that would announce its own death, which was repeated so often throughout the last century, in order to come back and ask the same question again through the viability of painting. Redoing everything over again, redoing everything in the space of the painting, or, as he tried on other occasions, amplifying the experience into the space of the dwelling, covering everything with painting, or making a giant palimpsest, a diary of his multiple experiences with the image (invoking Kurt Schwitters, almost calling up his ghost).

Redoing is a practice of painting, perhaps one of its most profitable processes: Ingres redoes David, Manet redoes Velázquez, who had redone Titian, Matisse redoes Cézanne, Picasso redoes Velázquez – all in a spiral of the recurrence of the same through other ways, through other processes, with other aims and for other times. Redoing implies acute awareness of the time and the hiatus between what one does and what was once done.

It is this adequation to the time of the painting, to its recursive and cyclical time, that is present in Hugo Canoilas’s work, because doing again always means doing anew, in order to test whether the painting is possible. The starting point for this question is the most difficult thing, because it is that of its death foretold. For that very reason the experience of testing the dryness of the monochrome, the harshness of the geometric shape that loses its balance in the pictorial plane is much more than a simple repetition.

It is an essay.

Biography
Hugo Canoilas was born in 1977 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He has a degree in Visual Arts Studies from the Escola Superior de Arte e Design de Caldas da Rainha, then a masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art (London), for which he received a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Although initially more dedicated to painting, his work has broadened out into the fields of sculpture, photography, video, installation and performance. Among the many exhibitions in which he has participated, both solo or group show, one should highlight A casa de meu pai, Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB, Lisbon, 2005), Pinturas inglesas e outros trabalhos, Galeria de Pintura do Rei D. Luís, Palácio da Ajuda (Lisbon, 2006) and Vota Octávio Pato, Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, 2007). He is represented in the following collections: Fundação Carmona e Costa (Lisbon), CCB (Lisbon), Budapest Gallery (Budapest), Associação Nacional de Jovens Empresários (Oporto), and the Fundação PLMJ (Lisbon).

Bibliography
Canoilas, Hugo (et al.), Mas o contraste não me esmaga, Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, 2007.
Endless killing (cat.), Huarte (Navarra), Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, 2008.