Art Brussels: Hugo Cantegrel
April 20, 2023 — April 23, 2023
Galeria Foco – Art Brussels, Brussels Expo
On the occasion of the solo presentation of the Lisbon-based French artist Hugo Cantegrel and Foco Gallery, a short text describing their project for the booth was created.
Woke up Dreaming of a New World
Built on the idea of his latest show, It Was All a Dream, the solo booth presentation of French multimedia artist Hugo Cantegrel consists of wide range of works: speculative paintings, bronze sculptures, various appropriated images cohabiting together in metal frames and ceramic objects. What is significant for this body of work is that through the unsual use of materials and ready-mades Cantegrel builds completely new and often not only poetic but also critical narratives. Fig trees are through his practice growing out of tripods, a dog is gliding the air, a lifebuoy imposter ironically defies its function. Altered phrases, floting punch lines hand-engraved into acrylics, beams and leave traces in one’s memory while the paintirly gestures figures almost as a hybrid of unique human’s sensitivity and a cold technocratic spectacle. Cantegrel’s streak of witty sarcasm and a sense for absurd mimics the moment when one wakes up – a binary running between raw reality and a dreaming mind. There hanging remainder of naivety or hope still remains. In such a manner, Cantegrel creates dialogues that moves from just imaginable to actual su(pe)rreal scenes.
The still-life sculptures, cast in a traditional iron mold, are raptured pieces of burned branches, a botanical world gradually eaten by the junks of technology, reaching up to the ceilings of the Brussels Exhibition Center to create a setting for other shattered works of art. The central work, Soft Winds, a UV print on aluminum, uses metal frame as a symphony score. There, individual reframed, reformatted, and reprinted images let the neon crackle and breathe in one unified rhythm. The visual components are intuitively selected from a variety of sources: the artists’ own and family archives, random finds around town, flea markets. The series Good News is a reflection of a long term interest of Catengrel - neverending attempt to catch ephemeral time (sometimes the ones we long wish for), to only to see it just slip away. The techno-political discourse is complemented by the most contemporary series, Simulations - paintings questioning and speculating not only the role of the given medium but also the representation of one’s reality, it’s structuralization and happenings.
Following on the heels of postmodern theoretical discourse, Hugo Cantegrel’s practice acknowledges the relative nature of truth – the fluid border between reality, its interpretation, and fiction. A wide range of media is connected by the same unified scope and distinctive playful language. Everyday occurrences are transformed through the curious usage of materials so the physicality of the artwork becomes a relic of the artist’s process of investigation into the essence of things; meaning, on the other hand, is modified through unexpected juxtapositions. These contrasting flows of visual, discursive, and metaphorical representations are results of the speculations; speculations on memories, future environments and unpredictable human actions. In this way, Cantegrel’s appropriated images and twisted bodies of various materialities constitute an exposition of rigid uniformities and contemporary ambiguous conditions. Hugo Cantegrel (Paris, 1991) graduated from Central Saint Martins (London) in 2015. He now works and lives in Lisbon.