Gonzalo Reyes Araos

Visual artist and director of HR Residency

galerie PLUTO is pleased to welcome this summer’s artist-in-residence, Gonzalo Reyes Araos. Gonzalo Reyes Araos (b. 1980, Quilpué, Chile) 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.

“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