Mini-Cinema

Hugo Cantin is a Montreal-based artist, designer, and film collector whose work has met with remarkable success in various art markets in America, Europe, and Asia. Hugo creates linear-patterned collages using vintage film stock, which he illuminates with LEDs in elegantly-built wooden and metal lightboxes. His work achieves a keen, sophisticated aesthetic from a design standpoint, even as Hugo weaves highly intuitive historical narrations into his splicing of found film. Inspired by the psychedelic and by mid-century figures and movements, Hugo effects dream-like meditations on some of the twentieth century's most captivating and iconic images, such as those of The Beatles, Warhol, New York City, the Apollo moon landing, and the pin-up girl. Although his light boxes distinguish themselves as decorative objects of taste and style, it is Hugo Cantin's sensitive, finely-tuned rendering of time on a flat surface that lends his works their luminosity and depth.