«All the images will disappear. (…) Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of being who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.»

Annie Ernaux, The Years, 2008

“You will remember” means “You will continue to recount”.
HELL WHAT A VIEW is as much a space as a moment in which we reconsider the elaboration of the memory, of its staging – its enactment. Dreams are nothing more than light breezes tinged with colours that evaporate. The soft lights of dusk and dawn are one. Old memories are resurfacing. Is the past not as alive as the present? Through the window one contemplates, one remembers; the time has already stopped. A material bond is woven between the present and the past, transporting us into a reality that is tangible and abstract, a reality already passed, dissolved. For Hugo Cantegrel, each work of the exhibition exists only through its unique context, referring only to itself, to its own memory. From installation to performance via writing, photography and painting, Hugo Cantegrel invites us to dive back, with a certain nostalgia, into our childhood. For the artist it is through visual and textual entities that memory is composed, re-composed, and influences our past as much as our present. Memory is a link between living and death, dream and history, real and imaginary.

Text by Aude Vignac