When we approach the paintings, each fragment is a square of hand-painted paper. As we step back, these fragments fall into a grid that might recall an abstract geometric painting, or the pixelation of a drip painting. Yet what is being represented is the inside of a monitor, what lies behind it when it is taken apart, where the weave of countless combinations of red, green and blue subpixels becomes visible.
Gonzalo Reyes Araos has spent years working on this blind spot. In “Cielo rojo y verde y azul de fondo de pantalla de tu vida” (“Red and green and blue sky wallpaper of your life,” 2023), the exhibition I had the privilege of curating, the artist transduced the light of the Valparaíso sky into RGB code, letting the weather determine the luminous behavior of the room. In ARITHMOS this exercise is repeated in one of NAC’s windows, where the gesture, the computer code, becomes matter once again, and matter is, once again, painting. Light and the monitor cease to be an interface surface and become the object of study, almost archaeological, painted piece by piece on paper that records the distance between machine and hand. In this kind of dismantling of the screen, like an autopsy of the monitor, an “invisible anatomy” becomes visible. Paper does not emit light, it absorbs it; it does not generate pixels, it simulates them. It is in this gap between the technical model and its manual transduction that we can appreciate something close to what Simondon called individuation, in which part of it, the technical object, taken out of its function, begins to exist “by itself,” as an (in)form(ation) separate from the tool. Let us remember that paper is also a device of retention, an external memory much older than any electronic circuit, and putting it in “dialogue” with the image of a current circuit could conceptually produce a temporal short circuit, in which two technologies (technique-technology) are joined in a leap across thousands of years.
As I mentioned earlier, Gonzalo has been working on this link since his first works with light projections. We are thus clearly facing a displacement of painting that acknowledges its tradition without “quoting” it literally or nostalgically (as happens with a possible late modernity in the Chilean scene), placing it in tension with an object, or rather an artifact, that art history has not yet fully named. The grid and the flat color come from a place long before RGB, and yet here they can only be read through it. And then there is the deliberate defect in the falling of painted fragments that failed to hold, which adds a (non-linear) compositional beauty of a possible glitch that we will never see.
On the adjoining wall, like an echo, appears part of the Bitmap Poemarium series, created from the predictive text of the chat on Gonzalo’s smartphone, each poem converted into color code. Gonzalo’s series of paintings and the poems transduced from the smartphone’s predictive text raise the contemporary question of what will remain of the “human” when a machine predicts the next word or the next color (and by extension, the next decision), and who will sign that result. Will copyright necessarily have to be modified to allow for shared authorship? The answer to this is beside the point in the present exhibition; what matters is its aesthetic arrangement of the analog representation of the problem’s “digital entrails.”
In this show we can also appreciate and reflect on a nearly arithmetic process, in the literal sense, in Gonzalo’s way of working: counting squares, calculating color proportions, deciding how many greens are needed to simulate the light of a “stripped bare” screen. This manual arithmetic is the exact reverse of the calculation taking place inside any monitor, which executes millions of operations per second, unperceived, obviously, by our senses in any conscious (in)form. The exhibition opens up these two arithmetics with the delicacy of manual, plastic work.
The title, ARITHMOS, comes from the Greek for “number,” the Pythagorean obsession that the entire world could be reduced to numerical proportions, and it combines with “algorithm” to form a neologism. The subtitle, this beautiful piece of paper, is the result of an interaction with WhatsApp’s generative chat, which produced an unexpected response to serve as the subtitle of an art exhibition. That the name of the exhibition’s analog material was suggested by a machine learning model brings us back to the same question of where human authorship will end and where a non-animal “Other” will begin. What is interesting about Gonzalo Reyes Araos is that he does not try to cover up this possible ambiguity, much less resolve it, but leaves the “evidence” in plain view, with the same gesture he uses to paint a pixel.
Samuel Toro Contreras
Curator
