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© Gonzalo García Gaitán

© Gonzalo García Gaitán during his process

Colombian artist Gonzalo García Gaitán has been painting for more than twenty years. His path began in Bogotá, studying Fine Arts with an emphasis in visual arts at Universidad de los Andes. Later came specialized workshops - hyperrealism with Dru Blair in South Carolina, still-life foundations with Zane York at the New York Academy of Arts - all of which consolidated his discipline.

“What remains constant,” he says, “is my unwavering commitment to drawing as the fundamental basis of all my work, and my daily dedication to mastering traditional techniques, especially watercolor.”

These rigorous technical foundations now allow him to experiment conceptually while maintaining a solid foundation in craft.

While trained in acrylic, oil, sculpture, and electronic media, he returns to fragile materials like watercolor, volcanic ash, and urban dust as a deliberate resistance to speed and spectacle.

“Working with ash from Popocatépetl or dust collected from Bogotá's streets connects me to alchemical processes that transform the residual into art. By using traditional techniques to address contemporary themes, I invite the viewer to slow down, observe, and think carefully about the world we live in - about that obsolescent beauty that surrounds us.”

The Technocultural Landscape

In Panopticopías (2022–present), García constructs glowing orbs from obsolete convex television screens - “industrial prototypes of those compound eyes that characterize various insects with amplified vision,” as curator Emilio Tarazona puts it.

The idea grew out of what García calls the technocultural landscape: “networks of artifacts and devices of social and technological nature that form entangled relationships and affects where objects are indispensable.”
For his generation, televisions and video games were formative companions. Now, their presence has evolved into portable screens and constant connectivity, yet the consciousness of being “prosthetically united” to screens remains.

When he paints them, the monitors become eyes - technological and organic - that look back. In Panopticopías #9, villains embody the gaze that controls and manipulates; women stand as figures who resist, observe, or escape. “There’s symbolic tension,” he says, “but I always leave space for the viewer’s personal interpretation… identity is not fixed. We contain multitudes.”

Nostalgia, Control, and the Collective Gaze

Donna Haraway’s line “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” sits at the core of Panopticopías. Painting these mute, obsolete machines dramatizes the boundary between technological agency and human passivity. “By representing them turned off or emitting nostalgic flashes, I question who observes whom, and who holds the power to look, remember, or erase.”

Each screen is an individual story, with scratches, signs of use, and specific models. But together they form a collective panopticon: “a choral vision about the desire to see and be seen in contemporary culture.”

Viewers often describe the work as nostalgic yet unsettling. For García, it’s all at once: critique, elegy, and personal reflection. “My work functions both as archive and proposition. A space where whispers from the past meet voices of the present and questions of the future.”

Dust, Ash, and the Involuntary Archive

Residue is more than metaphor. For García, it’s an involuntary archive “time itself in the process of solidification.” In Mordiendo Polvo, dust collected from Bogotá’s streets merges with fragments of corroded political posters, fixing images of faded slogans through a hand-crafted, photosensitive process.

Steven Connor calls dust “formless”; Carolyn Steedman calls it “the only thing that matters.” For García, it’s both: “the testimony of circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing.” His pigments, made from dust, debris, volcanic ash, become alchemical transformations, turning what is discarded into something that can persist.

In Cúmulo, ash from a 2023 eruption of Popocatépetl becomes devotional images. Hands, bread, bottles: “universal gestures of giving, feeding, sharing, celebrating.”

Ash, he says, embodies the duality between destruction and fertility: “a sacred presence that helps nourish the earth but hides the potential to destroy everything.”

Archiving the Forgotten

“I assume myself as an archivist of the forgotten,” García says. Working with political residues is an act of excavation. What is promised, erased, or left in ruins. In Mordiendo Polvo, he wonders whether “corroded political posters” refer to campaign ads on urban walls or to the metaphorical posters of cartels, corrupt justice, and systemic decay.

His work is both temporal and permanent. Tracing cycles of decadence while finding stability in the technique. “While the materials are transitory, the images are pure stability… I evoke things that have disappeared, from certain technologies to ideas about certain things, because it seems important to signal the transitoriness of things and how it impacts the present.”

Active Witness

Whether through televisions or dust, García positions himself as an “active witness”: observing, registering, but also intervening, reactivating residues so they can be read anew. “My role oscillates between the documentary and the poetic… I’m not just a passive observer; my practice implies activating critical thinking not just through ideas, but through form and craft.”

If someone only glimpses his work for a few seconds, he hopes they leave with the unease - and awareness - that even in the most banal materials lie layers of memory and history worth looking at again.

What’s Next

Upcoming projects continue his exploration of craft, technology, and collective memory. For the Biennial of Art of Medellín and Antioquia, he is preparing Hilo Vano - twelve antique sewing machines with flipbook animations and golden threads, “a poetic archaeology of domestic gestures” that wove memory and autonomy.

He will also present Biting Dust at UN FAIR in Bogotá, Panopticopía #8 at the International Watercolorists Meeting, and several projects with CK Contemporary gallery.

“I’m also curating Between Margins for Proceso Art Gallery and Smiling in Chaos with Durden and Ray. These projects keep me working at the intersection of traditional craft, technology, and collective memory - always seeking ways to transform residual materials into voices that speak to our contemporary condition.”

In Gonzalo García Gaitán’s work, nothing is truly gone. He archives what refuses to disappear, and in doing so, leaves us with the uneasy beauty of the marginal.

For further information check here:

https://www.instagram.com/gonzalogarciastudio/

https://www.gonzalogarcia.art/?fbclid=PAQ0xDSwLvTGZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABp6fJP3N2lswUYx3yGPBlHn8vMOk966JP-i7LB6U3ZowLmhcmkV-RGb5R3Y5I_aem_sKXLuR9oCTOEnPDa88bGWQ