26.09. – 09.11.2013
,Untitled – paintings on newspaper or magazine clippings‘, 2012/13 –
For his third solo exhibition at Nosbaum & Reding
the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas is restaging
a work originally conceived for the artist-run
space Ve.Sch (Verein für Raum und Form in der
bildenden Kunst) in Vienna. Presented in May
this year, this installation inverted the habitual
functions of the two spaces that constitute the
gallery: a wall-sized painting transformed the
bar area into an installation, while the exhibition
space properly speaking accommodated the seats,
benches and tables from the bar. Visitors were
encouraged to use the furniture and thus became
actors or performers of a work that highlighted
the contextual nature of our perception of art.
Canoilas’s painting, in turn, took the shape of a
large canvas covering the walls of the bar and
played with the idea of passiveness by using
historic advertisements found on the Internet.
Despite the ads’ political incorrectness –
praising the virtues of tobacco, alcohol and guns,
among others – their transfer into the medium
of painting and the effect resulting from their
accumulation eventually undermined their seditious
potential and opened a wider reflection on the
power of images. At Nosbaum & Reding Canoilas will
show the canvas used in Vienna, suspended in the
centre of the gallery like a membrane or skin –
the creased remains of a past intervention
whose “remastering” is completed by a variation
of the Viennese bar designed by Martin Vesely,
artist and manager of Ve.Sch. By updating and
recontextualising his work, which appropriates
the name of the artist-run space, Canoilas invites
spectators to reconsider the concepts of originality
and functionality while questioning the notion
of in situ work. His installation is surrounded by
a series of small paintings on newspaper or magazine
clippings; resulting from processes in which
chance plays a key role, they explore the potential
of painting as a mediator of everyday reality.
