Presenting as a conventional gallery show, Hugo Canoilas’s exhibition “Buoyant” revealed itself upon closer inspection to be a fascinating experimental investigation into perception—specifically, the perception of nature. It was also a hypothesis on new forms of coexistence, of the kind that Chus Martínez, in her 2020 essay “The Invention Is Nature,” discerns in the similarities between nature and process-based art.

Born in Lisbon in 1977 and now resident in Vienna for roughly a decade, Canoilas makes work that is smart and brimming with energy: Legacy imagemaking practices enjoy a new lease on