Hugo Avigo's solo exhibition at Galerie Chloe Salgado in Paris.
Hugo Avigo: Cold Open
9 January - 13 February, 2021
Galerie Chloe Salgado, Paris
« Things do not have to wait for me in order to have their signification. Signification is inscribed objectively in the thing: for example, there is fatigue, and that is all. There is this large round sun, this uphill street, this tiredness in the small [hollow] of the back. As for myself, I am here for nothing (Moi je n’y suis pour rien). It is not me who is fatigued. I do not invent anything, I do not project anything, I make nothing come into the world; I am nothing, not even nothingness; above all, I am not “nothing but an expression.” I do not attach little significations to things. The object does not have a signification, it is its signification: fatigue. »1 It is as such that Gilles Deleuze begins an article not on fatigue, but on femineity. Far from his subject of analysis, he presents us with a ‘cold open’ (or teaser sequence)– a narrative tactic used in television and cinema that consists in bringing the spectator into the middle of a plot, or even in telling a stand-alone story independent of the narrative– speaking of his own fatigue out of the blue.
For his solo exhibition at the GALERIE CHLOE SALGADO, Hugo Avigo presents us with a cold open. Yet, here, the sun is square, the uphill street escapes us, and the hollowness of the back is transported to the center of a heart. Decorative by way of pop, and troubling by way of absence, the works of Avigo throw us into a story that never was, a narrative with neither beginning nor end, a cold open of ambiguity and doubt.
One mustn’t go any further to seek the meaning of the things here present– sunsets (or sunrises?), elevators– because they evoke nothing other than the intangible: a liminal and transitory state, the threshold of something. Fatigue? Perhaps. Or an oscillation between optimism and skepticism. Yet, what is indeed at stake is fleetingness– whether it be an escape out to sea, a journey in slumber, moving up or down, or even, a love before it ever could be.
We find this same transience in the gestures present. The canvases break free from their usual forms, the sun, too, giving us the impression that the creator of these scenes at once feel-good– with their color palettes that recall the luminous spectrum of sunsets– and anxiety ridden– with their dizzying forms, on the brink of abstraction– is preparing for a crazy adventure, or a desperate escape. Incertitude is exhausting. So let us dream instead of a cold open that can warm us, that can cradle us in the twilight, without wondering where we are, nor when it will be over.
Katia Porro
Born in 1988, Hugo Avigo lives in Paris and works at L’Orfèvrerie in SaintDenis. After graduating from the Central Saint Martins School in London in 2011, Hugo Avigo graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with honours in 2015. Since then, he has developed an audacious practice playing with a masterful exaggeration of the rules of sculpture, painting and installation.
His works, often of extravagant scale, inhabit space in unexpected ways and challenge our preconceived ideas about bodies and their gravity, places and their functions, and more generally, about representation, in order to destabilize our perception of everyday life. He presents his first solo exhibition, European Painter Tour, in the artist-run space Tonus, in Paris in 2017. In 2018, he co-curated the first edition of Feÿ, Rencontres d’Arts, at the Château du Feÿ in Villecien, and in December 2020, he presented Le syndrome du sommier at Poush in Clichy, a project supported by the Île-de-France Region within the framework of FoRTE. Among his group exhibitions, we notably remember his participation in Rêvez ! #2, at the Collection Lambert in Avignon (2017), at the contemporary art fair Paris Internationale alongside Tonus (2017), at So Close at the Guido Romero Pierini gallery (2020), at Your Friends and Neighbors at the High Art gallery (2020), and more recently at La Totale, at Studio Orta - Les Moulins (2020).
