As a child, I spent countless hours in my father’s mechanical workshop, surrounded by tools, engines, and dismantled machines. I became fascinated not only by how things worked, but also by the invisible systems that held them together. I learned to look beyond an object’s surface—to imagine its internal structure, understand its function, and consider how it might be repaired or transformed.

That way of looking, moving between the visible object and the system behind it, remains central to my artistic practice. I found in watercolor a means of slowing down this process of observation. For more than twenty years, its transparency, precision, and gradual accumulation of layers have allowed me to examine technological objects with an attention that contrasts with the speed at which they are produced, consumed, and discarded.

My practice also includes drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, animation, sound, and electronic media. Across these forms, I explore how technology shapes memory, perception, identity, and everyday behavior. CRT televisions, sewing machines, boomboxes, screens, archives, insects, and obsolete devices recur throughout my work. I approach them not simply as nostalgic objects, but as material evidence of the systems that organize domestic life, labor, entertainment, surveillance, and our relationship with images.

When a technology becomes obsolete, its practical function may disappear, but the habits, emotions, and cultural meanings attached to it remain. In my paintings, fragile layers of watercolor reconstruct the weight and complexity of industrial objects. In my installations, familiar machines are altered through movement, light, sound, and animation, becoming objects that appear to remember, observe, or act independently.

Through bodies of work such as Panopticopías, Hilo Vano, Mordiendo Polvo, Boomboxtalgia, and Insectopías, I explore what I understand as the technocultural landscape: a territory in which machines, images, memories, and human behavior continually shape one another.

Rather than explaining these objects or fixing their meaning, I seek to make them unfamiliar again. By placing them between recognition and estrangement, I invite viewers to reconsider the technologies that have accompanied their lives and the subtle ways in which those technologies continue to inhabit them.

El texto de la descripción va aquíGonzalo García Gaitán is a Colombian visual artist born in Bogotá in 1981. Working across watercolor, drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, animation, sound, and electronic media, his practice explores the relationships between technology, memory, perception, and material culture. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.

For more than two decades, García has examined how technological objects and obsolete media continue to shape individual and collective experience. Televisions, sewing machines, boomboxes, domestic artifacts, and archival materials recur throughout his work, moving between meticulous representation and the construction of kinetic, sonic, and electronic installations.

His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Colombia and internationally, including the Curitiba Biennial, the Asunción Biennial, Museu Paranaense, Museo Nacional de Colombia, Museo de Arte del Tolima, CK Contemporary, Durden and Ray, SCOPE Art Fair, SP–Arte, LA Art Show, and San Francisco Art Fair.

García received First Prize at the Salón de Arte Cinético of Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in 2024, Second Place at the Salón Nacional de Pintura in 2022, and First Prize at the III Salón de Arte Joven at Club El Nogal.