Ugo Sébastião often says that he rarely repeats the same process. Thus, among the ten new paintings in his second exhibition at Pal Project gallery, the artist has experimented in various ways—playing darts with his brushes or letting woodworms act as masters of randomness. He has used solvent in an attempt to erase, or lead to weigh down the burden of history. This heightened materiality, born from a frantic search for embodiment, must be understood in relation to a second dynamic. Working from source images collected online, the artist engages in a serial and cerebral variation of a single motif, presenting us with an altered repetition. This approach particularly applies to the repertoire of Baroque painting an inexhaustible reservoir of twilight vanities, arched bodies, and convulsing saints that seem eerily familiar. The artist’s final work balances on this uncertain threshold between circulation and recapture.
Born in 1998 in Lyon, the artist belongs to a new generation navigating multiple distinct artistic legacies while seeking to differentiate themselves. There is, of course, canonical painting—preserved and historiographed—but also the more recent tradition of artists who, throughout the 20th century, challenged the status of the technically reproducible image. These so-called "iconographer artists"¹ legitimized practices such as collage, collecting, reframing, sampling,
reblogging, and
resharing. At the same time, they demonstrated how inherited criteria of originality, individuality, and invention are disqualified in the post-media, even post-internet, condition. Today, however, merely surfing an ocean of images is no longer enough, and the allure of dematerialization has lost its charm. By physically engaging in the production of "irregular objects,"² Ugo Sébastião rematerializes the residues of the liquid era.
With The Doubts, the artist speaks of a "attempt to use, to exhaust a method until it shifts into something else."³ Persisting Shapes (2022), his previous exhibition at the gallery, introduced some of his distinctive formal traits: acidic green hues, Baroque citations, and mask motifs. Upon closer inspection, some paintings in this new series reveal unprecedented points of rupture—a six-fingered hand, in particular, raises suspicion. This anomaly reveals the use of artificial intelligence to generate certain motifs. In the monumental canvas
The Doubt, different iconographic registers coexist on the same plane: AI-generated imagery sits alongside live painting and borrowings from pictorial tradition. Yet, the final impression emerges from the artist’s physical engagement with a flat surface, assembling colors in a specific order. Immediate recognition gives way to a slowed-down reading rhythm, and the dulled pleasure of the sensory cautiously reasserts itself—beyond dematerialization.
In
Immediacy, Or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), Anna Kornbluh defines immediacy as the cultural style of the 2010s. According to her, it establishes an omnipresent tyranny where everything becomes instantaneous and immersive: "Immediacy is the flood with nothing to absorb it, the stylized inundation of intense immanence within our cultural aesthetics, eerily mirroring the contemporary conditions of oil spills and tsunamis."⁴ While Ugo Sébastião grapples with the same unsettling present, his irregular canvases scar immanence itself, inviting a situated reappropriation of our reproduced memory.
¹ Garance Chabert et Aurélien Mole (éd.), Les artistes iconographes, Empire books/Villa du Parc, 2018.
² interview with the artist, The use of the expression can be seen as a nod to the 'irregular pearl,' or barroco in Portuguese, from which the Baroque derives its name.
³ interview with the artist, Ibid.
⁴ Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The style of too-late capitalism, Verso, 2024. p. 33 [T. de l’a].
Texte de : Ingrid Luquet-Gad
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