Gonzalo Reyes Araos

Gonzalo Reyes Araos (*1980) is a research artist who is interested in the intersection of light, communication, and human perception. He studied at the School of Fine Arts of Valparaíso, Chile and today divides his time between the arid Atacama desert in Chile and Berlin.

His work has been exhibited in numerous project spaces, institutions, and galleries throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and is part of a number of collections such as the Shandong Art Museum, China; Corporación Cultural de Viña del Mar; Casa de Cultura de Limache, Chile and private collections in Switzerland, Chile, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and South Korea.

Cielo rojo y verde y azul

red and green and blue sky 2023
site-specific installation,
LED light system and Arduino,
630 x 345 cm.
View of the exhibition «Cielo rojo y verde y azul» Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, Chile.

The title of the piece has been generated by a predictive keyboard, the misspellings and odd grammar have ben preserved to reflect the glitches in our current systems.

Recent exhibition

. . . the sky is falling asleep on the desk of the time . . . a solo exhibition by Gonzalo Reyes Araos 16 March to 28 April 2023

Having recently returned to Berlin after seven months of working with artists in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, the title of the exhibition comes from an AI series of predictive text prompts that was generated from his past correspondence. Computer code will be turned into puzzle pieces where meaning can be shifted by moving the blocks. There will also be patterned grids of multiple paper strips with glitches representing the constellations of the indigenous Atacameño people of the desert who because of the absence of light pollution have too many intensely bright stars and instead seek their constellations in the empty black space between the stars.

Artist Gonzalo Reyes Araos interviewed by author, anthropologist, and book publisher Piet Meyer at Galerie Peter Gaugy in Vienna, Austria on 15 April 2023 in conjunction with the solo-exhibition “. . .sky is falling asleep on the desk of the time. . .”.

Bitmap Poemarium by Gonzalo Reyes Araos

Book Launch and Artist Talk

13 April 2023

Also held in conjunction with the exhibition “. . .sky is falling asleep on the desk of the time. . .” was an artist talk and the launch activity of the publication “BITMAP POEMARIUM”. This is an artist’s book that brings together a collection of 33 conceptual poems. In a nod to the Surrealist’s “automatic writing,” practices of the early 20th century, the artist has created a form of poetry by limiting his composition to the predictive text prompts suggested by his phone. Drawing on ideas cited by the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, the artist believes that over time, the use of his mobile phone has made it an extension of his own neural system and that therefore, part of his own subconscious resides in the memory of the electronic device. The poems were transformed into a “bitmap” code, to make the computer interpret each word as a colour code. These images go along with the poems, while the viewer is able to read the inside and outside of a digital image.