ART-PRESENTATON: Hugo Canoilas -On The Extremes Of Good And Evil
Hugo Canoilas is part of a generation of Portuguese artists who process legacies of contemporary art, taking inspiration from certain artists from the Anglo-American and Latin American contexts, who at certain moments, for example in the 1960’s, developed poignant art proposals. The recent Portuguese artistic inquiry is interesting: in the history of the country, a sense of isolation and separation from the main centres and main histories are recurring features.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: mumok Archive
Hugo Canoilas uses the tradition and history of painting and object art to redefine and expand the connection between installation and performance strategies. Along with art history, he also references sociopolitical developments and the philosophical and art-theoretical discourses it involves. The departure points are interconnected topics such as the climate crisis, environmental degradation, and the ever-widening gap between poor and rich countries, whose virulence is spurred on by the corona- virus pandemic. The artist ties his work in with these developments and their effects first and foremost in posthumanist schools of thought that call a rigid anthropocentric, hierarchical worldview into question and call for a careful and egalitarian human treatment of nature and its creatures. In his solo exhibition “On The Extremes Of Good And Evil”, as winner of the Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2020/2021*, Canoilas tilts it to the horizontal plane and constructs it as a walk-on floor work. Spread out across the textile ground is a painterly scenario of confluent forms with insular centers. The blue ground and the colorful, prehistoric-looking, jellyfish-like tentacular creatures made of wool and glass remind viewers of densely populated maritime landscapes of unfathomable depths. In a time when keeping one’s distance is the survival principle du jour, viewers find themselves immersed in an inescapable biosphere where temptation and menace, the organic and the technoid coexist. Viewing the paintings below one’s feet from above also reminds one of digital landscape scenarios like the ones photographed by drones. The change of perspective may be understood metaphorically as a departure and distancing from trained social perceptions and behaviors to approach things with a different mindset and perhaps indeed get closer to the heart of the matter. The exhibition is also the venue for a performance Elise Lammer and Julie Monot have developed on the artist’s invitation, entitled “BECOMING DOG” which questions the hierarchical relationship between humans and animals, replacing it with the principle of empathy in an institutional space. Actors dressed as dogs intermittently use the painting as a stage. As creatures that usually sniff their way across the ground, they embody the intent to qualify the upright gait and stereoscopic vision as the measure of all things. Human and animal traits seem blended like in a drag show to put ostensible certainties about identity and uniqueness up for discussion.
*The Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize 2020/2021is an award that promotes young artists based in Austria and was initiated by the Kapsch Group and mumok in 2016. After Anna-Sophie Berger (2016), Julian Turner (2017), Ute Müller (2018), and Anita Leisz (2019), Hugo Canoilas is its fifth recipient. Honored with a prize money of 10,000 EUR, the prize includes a solo exhibition at mumok and a catalog published in conjunction with it. Additionally, one of the recipient’s works or work groups is purchased by the Kapsch Group for the mumok collection.
Photo: Elise Lammer and Julie Monot, with Hugo Canoilas, BECOMING DOG, 2020 , Photo: Klaus Pichler, © Hugo Canoilas, Julie Monot and Elise Lammer
Info: Curator: Rainer Fuchs, mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 8/12/2020-5/4/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mumok.at
