About PLUTO Artist-in-Residence, Gonzalo Reyes Araos

Gonzalo Reyes Araos is a research artist who is interested in the intersection of light, communication, and human perception. His transdisciplinary and conceptual works examine the disciplines of painting, light installations, the use of AI poetry, and digital programming while challenging the Anthropocene and its paradigmatic control over reality. Recognizing the possibility of connecting with physical places by revisiting them in virtual spaces, Reyes Araos makes visible new architectures of communication built from image and light. These poignant perspectives create access points to a networked and multidimensional system of thought and experience.

Reyes Araos was born in Quiplué Chile, in 1980. In 2004, after completing a degree in Fine Arts at the School of Fine Arts of Valparaíso he moved to Europe in 2006. He now divides his time between Berlin and the arid Atacama desert in Chile. His work has been shown internationally in Austria, Germany, Korea, China, Spain, the Netherlands and Chile and he is represented by galleries in Chile and Vienna, and in numerous private collections in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Chile, United States of America, and South Korea.

  • “In 2023, I developed an artistic research employing automatic writing methods with my smartphone. The outcome was a series of <<surrealistic>> tone poems coming from the <<unconscious>> of my phone.

    While these sentences may have appeared nonsensical to the writer, the ‘poems’ resonated deeply, seemingly originating from the writer’s ‘soul’, and evoking profound sensations in sentient and sensitive human beings.

    Psychoanalysis, driven by Freud, gave rise to the inspirations of the surrealist movement about 100 years ago. Today advances in neuroscience study the functioning of our brain and, with it, the way we relate to reality. These advances have contributed to the improvement of artificial intelligence algorithms, which mimic the functioning of a human brain through a complex neural learning network. Quantum physics also studies the different states of atomic matter, thus the mixed possibilities of reality they form, suggesting that everything we perceive as <<matter>> is 99.0% energy, and its state can be influenced depending on the observer’s point of view (quantum superposition).

    These facts have stirred within me a deep concern about our perception of <<reality>>. They have sparked a series of questions that I wish to raise through a new investigation: Why do certain things without apparent sense move sensitive threads of the interior of a thinking soul? If we exist in a world of subjective complexity, is the reality we perceive a form of Pareidolia?”


     - Gonzalo Reyes Araos, 2024

 
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Gonzalo Reyes Araos

I remember correctly you are you and the rest is history

galerie PLUTO is pleased to welcome artist-in-residence Gonzalo Reyes Araos. A Chilean artist living in Berlin, Reyes Araos engages in a transdisciplinary creative process. His practice is inspired by his migration experiences (Switzerland, Belgium, China and Germany) and his explorations of the culture and environment of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Time spent in research and development at galerie PLUTO will allow Reyes Araos to create a new project, “I remember correctly you are you and the rest is history” posing a central question: “Is the reality we perceive a form of pareidolia?” This phenomenon is the human ability to find meaning in an ambiguous stimulus. This perceptual ability allows one to imagine an object or pattern where there is none. This summer Reyes Araos experienced pareidolia as he observed cloud patterns from PLUTO’s terrace overlooking the Rhine.

PLUTO has facilitated opportunities for Reyes Araos to engage in conversations with scientific and scholarly collaborators at the University of Bonn, making it a good fit for PLUTO’s commitment to the overlap of art and science. Reyes Araos’ piece, “I remember correctly you are you and the rest is history” was titled after an excerpt from his previous work, Poem N_030.

 

Gonzalo Reyes Araos, WIP cloud study of a "rabbit” at galerie PLUTO, 2024.

Digital communication has made binary code a metaphor for the universe, an architectural structure in which much human interaction resides.

- Gonzalo Reyes Araos