Middle Gate

“As an artist, he reinvented himself for the third time in the 1990s, but this time in the more traditional framework that his teaching required. He made more personal work, reworked his coloured photographs from the early 1970s, and worked closely with his students on their individual or collective projects…What I did not see at the time was that behind Hugo as a jester (as in his self-portrait as a dancing harlequin) there was also a serious artist at work. Coloured spaces, coloured photographs, coloured works from the past that were brought up-to-date. Works he had created in the 1970s, which he now printed in large format and even on aluminium plates. Which he then presented ‘almost sloppily’ as if he wanted to sabotage his own work, the new aesthetic that he —who never cared much for ‘beauty’—had reinvented by raking up his past. That entire last period in Hugo’s work is one gigantic Möbius strip that constantly reinvents itself, a return to the past as present, an eternal return in which he reimagines the work from his youth as a work of the future. Because the 7 past is not really the past, it is also the source of the future.”

Marc Holthof, The End is a New Beginning [essay], 2024