Opening: 22 March, 10 pm
Quadrado Azul gallery is glad to present a new show by Hugo Canoilas with Antónia Labaredas. The exhibition is composed by a site specific installation that receives paintings by Hugo Canoilas and a new body of ceramic works by Antónia Labaredas.
The monochromatic layer that takes the exhibition floor brings a shapeless set of rejected and obsolete objects. Resembling the bottom of a river that hosts these objects of unknown colors, the scenario carries the latent projection of a post-apocalyptic future, of the toxic sludge poured from a deposit of a nuclear power station.
The room is converted into an intersection point where visible and invisible touch and contaminate each other through a violent, almost animal, metamorphosis, in the way its saturated colors strike us. One passes from an animal glance - looking down, to the objects on the floor we step on - to a more human glance - looking to the paintings and sculptures.
This transformation arises as a rite of passage from the post-apocalyptic scenario that colonizes our future to a group of works, from both Labaredas and Canoilas, that are open receptacles for our projections, in order to contest that predetermined or even an absent future.
The animals and the flora evoked in these works, especially the elements from the sea bottom, seem to have the value of an unknown part of us, a submerged but still inhabited area. The sea bottom, or the nature here given as new, metaphorically evokes a turmoil of uncertainties that haunt us from a social, political, ecological and technological point of view. They are a call to the interior, a return to our possibilities that releases us from the externally imposed narratives that mortgage the future and suspend the present.
Hugo Canoilas
Lisboa, Portugal, 1977. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
Hugo Canoilas' work has been integrated in group exhibitions such as XXX Bienal de São Paulo (2012), When elephants come marching in, at the De Appel Centre (2014), Meanwhile what about Socialism?-AV Festival, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, the IV Industrial Ural Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2017) and Publishing as an artistic toolbox:1989-2017 at Kunsthalle Wien and Futuro, at ARCO Madrid (2018). Solo exhibitions of his work include Vota Otávio Pato at Frankfurter Kunstverein (2007), Endless Killing, at Centro de Arte Contemporâneo Huarte, (2008), Spirit of the air, Wiener Art Foundation, Vienna (2013), Someone a long time ago now, Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2015) and Debaixo do Vulcão, MNAC- SONAE Art Cycles, Lisbon (2016).
Antónia Labaredas
Évora, 1979. Lives and works in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.
Antónia Labaredas' works have been presented in the exhibitions Incerta Desambiguação, Zaratan, Lisbon; Guimarães Noc Noc 7, Guimarães; Factor Cavalo - Emergências e fulgurações vernaculares na prática artística contemporânea, Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira; Art+feminism Edit-a-thon, Colectivo MIO, Espaço Concas, Centro de Artes de Caldas da rainha (2017); Guimarães Noc Noc 4, Hive, Guimarães and Cuidado com o Cão, Electricidade Estética, Centro de Artes de Caldas da Rainha (2014); Na senda da raposa - group project to “rádio Bandolim” from “Pizz Buin”, XV Bienal Internacional de Arte de Vila Nova de Cerveira and Celebração das Caldas às Caldas MIO”, musical performance, colectivo MOTOR, Inferno da Azenha, Caldas da Rainha (2008).
