HUGO CANOILAS – MAGMA
2013-04-15With its foundations in painting, Canoilas’ work is often collaborative and incorporates video, sound, sculpture and performance as well as research-based projects. Over the last decade painting has led him to establish a dialogue between abstraction and a style that nods towards social realism. With a strong interest in modernism and literature, Canoilas’ practice revisits histories from a political, poetic, religious or existentialist perspective and has a capacity to be in a limbo between some of these subjects.
For the past 3 years Canoilas has been collecting pages from free newspapers both at home and whilst travelling. Each page is selected either because of his inability to understand or comprehend the content both in terms of language and subject. These pages then form the ground for a series of paintings made ‘blind’ in which Canoilas presses the paper face down into paint. For Workplace Gallery, Canoilas has collaged a collection of these works by overlaying specifically selected and framed works with paintings projected from transparencies on analogue overhead projectors.
For his recent installation Paradise Birds – at 30th São Paulo Biennial – Canoilas created a series of epic scaled paintings on unframed, unprepared canvas using a process of dipping, staining, and drawing in Ink rather than paint. Depicting characters who first explored the interior territories of Brazil the paintings move between figuration and abstraction, performance and propaganda calling into question the status of both the works as art objects and their subjects as either national hero or political tools.
Exhibition runs through to May 4th, 2013
Workplace Gallery
The Old Post Office
19/21 West Street
Gateshead
NE8 1AD
