Foco Gallery is pleased to present Todas as coisas que nos fazem, a solo show by Hugo Cantegrel

Is there anything such as absolute novelty? This is one of the first questions Hugo asked me as we ast spoke on the phone. I was roaming through the city. Memory and the past are not the same, he also said at some point. It’s true: memory spans loss and desire, where everything falls within (the future, too). That’s what makes memorial antics so peculiar. They may look new: plexiglass, plastic, metal, ink. In the end, the new rarely looks new. It’s often ancient, in fact—it has either been invented, discovered, experienced, or forgotten. How can we know?, I asked. It might be light, soft, colourful. It might dance, suggesting a whole biography. It might form a collection, which in its turn might form a landscape, which might form a map. It might be tender. Memory is an update, I thought. It fills up the forgotten. It’s ambiguous.

Todas as coisas que nos fazem stages that ambiguity into constellations of objects and gestures, an ensemble of personal archives and found material. It articulates memory and strangeness within the familiar, seizing memory as a tool. The keychains added to the iron frames are a good example of that.
They were all sourced from flea markets, the ultimate upcycling of all things that were once new. Same thing with the photographs. Cantegrel paired up his personal archive with other, anonymous archives resonating a similar past. This is an important blend. First, because these elements are capsules, portals. They carry a specific mood in a specific time, a history. Second, because they instantiate how the intimate always dissolves into the archival. In the end, they stress that the universal experience of intimacy is repetition, and how that fades into anonymity once no one remembers whose intimacy it is anymore (once one is forgotten).

The abundant presence of images is not a coincidence, for images are precisely where this mbiguity surfaces more visibly. An image is always a form of insistence, a form of doubling down. Cantegrel prints them on aluminium, blending soft snippets of visual memorabilia (never complete) into cold, massproduced iron bars. Besides, there is a collection of videos from the last fifteen years, crystallising familial highlights and leisure landscapes into stills. And then there’s painting on glass: small rectangles the size of old photographs. This is both a fixing moment and a voluntary drift—it plays with the notion of gesture itself, for it is nearly absent from it. The surface is thin, blurry, frugal, almost sarcastic. You know, it all started with painting, Hugo told me as I crossed Gleisdreieck at the peak of dawn.

Nothing is as precise as the hand-shaped neons when it comes to replicate remembrance. Recognising one’s hand is an act of collective memory. Tracing it is most likely the most widespread gesture against anonymity–the single, first act of recognition that no one can forget. It precedes the mirror, the camera, the hologram. Hence it sets the tone for every other memory: a missed plane crossing the skies, the sea salt that lingers on the skin after a day at the beach, grazed by soft cloth. Hands have been folds, which have been chests, which have been terrain—that’s how hands sometimes are remembered. Today I realise that we tried to keep the contours of our size, the shadows, the colour, I once wrote about a memory that today I can’t recall. It’s all a very soft dream.
It feels like an endless conversation.

Guilherme Vilhena Martins