Oakville Galleries | Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath

Hold Your Breath is Hugo Canoilas’ first solo exhibition in Canada. 

The
exhibition presents an enormous, amorphous painting covering the entire
Centennial Gallery space. Visitors are guided throughout this
installation, encouraged to explore and walk over the artwork. The
material, arrangement and mise en scene of Hold Your Breath was
initially developed as an operatic set for Kunsthaus Bregenz and the
Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Austria. 

This
new presentation at Oakville Galleries reflects Canoilas’s practice of
revising and recontextualizing large-scale works to adapt to and
challenge the architecture of each exhibition space. Canoilas’ immersive
work features deep-sea imagery, including a microscopic view of an
octopus’s skin, a seashell, and a large siphonophore, symbolizing
symbiosis and mutualism. The painting installation also uses ROV
spotlights, contrasting the celestial light of historical painting with
the pure white of modern art. Images emerge from the darkness through
process-driven techniques that mimic nature.