In his first one-man exhibition in Italy, Hugo Canoilas shows new works of painting with text and object assemblages, pursuing his research on the expansion of painting and the verbal possibilities of objecthood. Nomadic works in times of poverty and necessity that establishes intriguing and powerful reminiscences of Arte Povera. As according to the artists statement:

“Some texts are painted on already painted canvas, that fits me very well, but which will require great technical accuracy in the way they are bonded to other fabrics so they can be stretched on the tops of wooden frames. Yes, on the tops and not the sides of the stretches because I cut the canvas in order to let them loose. I’m still fighting against the orthogonality of the canvas, trying to approach myself to my body, to round shapes – not fixed, to things free from the rational. The texts on the canvas are excerpts from books that are around the studio: some titles of performances or parts of texts on Kaprow, Embers by Becket and Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The texts on top of the paintings are the suspension of the activity of painting. One spends more time floating over the texts of each book and spends even more time on each word depicted. The dialogues and descriptions of space environments are embodied. The paintings seem at first just a structure to receive the text but by the end they are stretching my possibilities of doing so. The canvas are suspended with metal fishing wire and hold in their position by a fishing weight, that altogether, mark a drawing on the ground and the movement of the viewers who try to make elective affinities between texts.

In between one can find several objects, direct in their connection to a word: Shoe, bicycle and stone.The text brings an inner sound, a voice; it becomes more theatre than painting. The paintings seem to cry: Everything but painting. But they cannot help but to be paintings”.