Hugo Canoilas

Past / Present, 2005

When and how things or actions become art?  Where is the limit between art and life, between normative and alternative, inside and outside art institution?

As an artist, Hugo Canoilas knows that from Duchamp these interrogations are cyclic, without definitive answer and will probably remain so. Yet, if relational aesthetic is the present-day response, his practice readdresses the issues in a liminal and tangential manner to this. The vitrine is a hybrid reflecting the random legitimacy of art. Samples of modern art are mixed with found objects and photographs documenting some of his previous street interventions. The works make references to things that they are not any more; to real-world objects or to a certain type of praxis. However they do not allude to art itself, because they themselves have become art, within the institutional frame. Consequently, the art institution is no longer just an architectural or social space, but the medium, objectifying art as the best iconography of itself; and sometimes looks as artificial as a vitrine and as expressive as life’s death mask.