Art Brussels

Karlos Gil

Brussels, Belgium

Karlos Gil is interested in how objects and their meaning are transformed when placed in new environments, using abstraction, fragmentation and memory to create new narratives and readings, collapsing the temporal distance between past, present and future. His latest projects reflect on the relationship between technological development and the principles of the natural world, focusing on the borderline between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the industrial. Through a variety of media, he creates fragmentary scenarios inviting viewers to fill in a missing context by layering the artwork with encrypted backstories from the likes of industrial evolution, mythology, the occult, and biological research. Gil has been exploring diverse forms as living encrypted systems where art acts as a hypothesis against the unknown. 

Flat Bones is made up of four sculptures that make up an artificial skeleton of sorts, manufactured in stainless steel and pointing to different body parts (legs, torso, collar bone, arm). These industrial structures evoke mediaeval armours that used to protect warriors in battle. The work brings together two types of surface: the cold metal of the external armours and the interior of the warrior's body, ready for combat. The fact that these military protheses were made to be assembled, together with the finishes of each part, are a reminder of the fact that time will modify the reading of such objects: today, armours are studied as ornaments and not as objects of war.