Hugo Hectus (FR, 1997)
Period of residency: July 2024
I sought to continue my sculpture and writing work during this EXECAL residency while enhancing the environment of the residency itself. I began to design pieces in situ, envisaging my pavilion as a kind of isolated control tower, an edifice of expectation and obsession, focusing all my attention on observing the lake.
By tracing the path of the shadows, by observing how light underlines and reflects certain surfaces, and by modulating these phenomena using the pavilion’s multiple sliding walls, I created pieces that come to life thanks to and over time, producing a sense of exhaustion as they twist and turn – like an idea that slowly rises and unfolds over the course of the day, in the way that shadows stretch out, perverting the initial idea. So it is that one sculpture stands alone in a vertical position, while two others are already anticipating their future failure by virtue of their verticality. Waiting is omnipresent, scrutinized, and amplified, marked by the desire for an object of desire that will never arrive. It is an endlessly disappointing wait, where every hope of a reunion is thwarted by the immutability of the lake.
Amid these elements, I began writing daily, following the movement of light and concentrating the sun’s rays through various surfaces. These experiments gave rise to a series of “Holed Poems”, numbered and dated in direct relation to the moment when they were created. — Hugo Hectus
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.
Hugo Hectus, La Becque, 2024, photo Matthieu Croizier, Hugo Hectus and Aurélien Haslebacher