Hugo Hectus (FR, 1997)
Period of residence: July 2024
Born in Montpellier in 1997, Hugo Hectus is a French visual artist living and working in Paris, whose practice aims to deconstruct modes of communication in an attempt to outline their autonomous, subjective essence and a new sensitive language. His artistic production operates in a dual relationship: the obscure one maintained by art and literature, which he articulates under the idea of “solid poetry”, seeking through his sculptures the appearance of an ideal language, a language of desire, populated by other cultural ghosts from the English, German, Italian and Latin languages. A language “in space”, frozen in matter as if it pre-existed everything, enabling him to write without describing or showing, and constructed in a lexicon specific to each “Mottogories” – symbolic phrases of sorts that become matter and are integrated into the sculptures themselves.
After studying at the Sorbonne Paris IV university, Hectus graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne in 2021, and a BA in Visual Arts from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA). He is currently pursuing an MA in Visual Arts at ENSBA. Hectus’s work has recently featured in group exhibitions at Tunnel Tunnel in Lausanne (2023), Krone Couronne in Biel (2022), One gee in fog in Geneva (2022), and in solo exhibitions at ENSBA in Paris (2022) and ECAL in Lausanne (2021).
During his EXECAL residency at La Becque, Hectus will continue his research and writing work on the many dialects spoken in Switzerland through various linguistic, historical, and semiological prisms. He will also make the most of his presence on the shores of Lake Geneva to collect natural and architectural elements specific to the region, in order to create resin artefacts. In a second phase, he intends to associate 3D-modeled text elements with these organic sculptures, reintegrating them into a natural environment.
Hugo Hectus, photo Pavo Marinovic