EXECAL Resident at La Becque in July 2024
BIO
Born in Montpellier in 1997, Hugo Hectus is a French visual artist living and working in Paris, whose practice aims to deconstruct modes of communication in an attempt to outline their autonomous, subjective essence and a new sensitive language. His artistic production operates in a dual relationship: the obscure one maintained by art and literature, which he articulates under the idea of “solid poetry”, seeking through his sculptures the appearance of an ideal language, a language of desire, populated by other cultural ghosts from the English, German, Italian and Latin languages. A language “in space”, frozen in matter as if it pre-existed everything, enabling him to write without describing or showing, and constructed in a lexicon specific to each “Mottogories” – symbolic phrases of sorts that become matter and are integrated into the sculptures themselves. After studying at the Sorbonne Paris IV University, Hectus graduated with a Bachelor Graphic Design from ECAL in 2021, and a BA in Visual Arts from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA). He is currently pursuing a Master in Visual Arts at ENSBA. Hectus’s work has recently featured in group exhibitions at Tunnel Tunnel in Lausanne (2023), Krone Couronne in Biel (2022), One gee in fog in Geneva (2022), and in solo exhibitions at ENSBA in Paris (2022) and ECAL in Lausanne (2021). Portrait photo: Pavo Marinovic
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Hugo Hectus
Prix BCV | Visite de Courtoisie – Vol 1 is a 280-page art critical journal that recounts an 8-hour dinner performance on contemporary art that I organised at the Arsenic theatre (Lausanne, CH) with artists, curators, art historians and theatre programmers.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Gilles Gavillet, Jonathan Hares
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Diego Bontognali, Nicole Udry
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Angelo Benedetto
For the information design course the students have been asked to design a cartographic poster based on a film in the road movie genre, in a direct or abstract representation.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Aurèle Sack
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Aurèle Sack
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicole Udry
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Diego Bontognali
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Sacha Léopold (Syndicat)
During this workshop week, the students worked on the curation, mediation and placement of their own exhibition. The students selected a corpus of works from the iconographic and textual collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both based in New York. The exhibition space, 1.15m² (refering to the surface area of an F4 poster) is printable, hangable and foldable. It is both a surface but also a base or a volume. The students' results question the means of reproduction and representation of the works in the design of an exhibition.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Denis Roueche, Prune Simon-Vermot
During 4 days, the students in the first year of the Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and Photography were confronted with the weather in the Far North of La Chaux-de-Fond and presented the results of their work in the form of a giant calendar at QUARTIER GENERAL. With the participation of students: Pauline Baldinetti, Ines Barrionuevo, David Benito Py, Alexandre Brunisholz, Emma Chapuis, Lucien Grandjean, Hugo Hectus, Elena Najdovski, Julie Neuhaus, Laetitia Paroz, Guillaume Pavia, Caroline Perrenoud, Amanda Puna, Alizée Quinche, Clara Roumegoux, Steven Rüthy, Julie Ryser, Guillaume Schilter, Samuel Schmidt, Timo Tiffert, Laura Trummer, Adeline Vermot, Loris Wahler, Justine Willa Teachers: Denis Roueche, Prune Simon Vermot Assistants: Amaury Hamon, Clément Lambelet, Olivia Schenker
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Giliane Cachin
Poster design communicating a fictitious opening of editorial publications.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicole Udry
Communication of a chosen press article. Second year course of graphic design in context, centered on image creation and editorial design.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Harry Bloch
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Guy Meldem
GRAPHIC DESIGN
with Nicolas Haeni, Robert Huber
Graphic designer Robert Huber and photographer Nicolas Haeni piloted a transversal workshop between the first years Bachelor Graphic Design and Photography. By joining their complementary skills, several groups of students selected a swiss tourism-related activity, offering an alternative and offbeat vision in edition form.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
by Pauline Baldinetti, Inés Barrionuevo, Emilie Bouchet, Emma Chapuis, Isabel Garcia Argos, Hugo Hectus, Elena Najdovski, Julie Neuhaus, Thaïs Nguyen Huu, Lynne Nougou, Laetitia Paroz, Guillaume Pavia, Ares Pedroli, Amanda Puna, Julie Ryser, Samuel Schmidt, Timo Tiffert, Laura Trummer, Adeline Vermot
Screenprinting workshop supervised by Gilles de brock, assisted by Sylvain Croci-Torti