Hugo Canoilas @ Cooper Gallery

The reading list – slipped in the middle of the handout for Hugo Canoilas' gallery-saturating exhibition Someone a long time ago, now – is as alienating as it is endearing. Let loose on the entire gallery, Canoilas stripes the Cooper’s corridor walls upstairs and carves broken stanzas into the gallery downstairs. It’s this list of Camus, Sartre and Kierkegard that finally belies the whole-hearted earnestness of the big doodles on the walls.

There’s a clunky poetry to the works, with (probably literally) old-school OHPs shining duct-taped transparencies onto large, unprimed canvases. From an upturned car to the documentation of an 'action on the streets of Vienna' (which looks like Canoilas draped in inked yellow fabric), the imagery is without obvious coherence and between each there’s an (admittedly soft) colliding.

Working in the corridor and conventional gallery space upstairs, Canoilas sets up two very different spaces. Running hand-painted lines, large line drawings and text writ large along the walls of the corridor space (along with some small sculptures), just next door hosts the most conventionally set-out room of the exhibition. Even still, the unprimed canvas is almost postered directly on the wall, and there’s probably too many large scale paintings (of dinosaurs speaking melodramtic poetic text), making for a more subtly jarring encounter than is set up in the other spaces.

The most exciting and poignant moment of the exhibition comes in the comic hanging from the ceiling in the upstairs corridor, above a triangular chair – which appears in the comic itself. In the accompanying publication, Canoilas’ friend and former classmate Francisco Sousa Lobo records his pains in forming a response to the exhibition, and finishes instead with a sensitive frustration that criticism is impaired by friendship. From references to Jackson Pollock to pained Rimbaud quotes, its clashing of boisterousness with (at times adolescent, though seemingly self-aware) poetic sensibility overall feels more double-jointed than disjointed.