Foreign Skies is the first major artist catalogue for Gonzalo Reyes Araos, presenting a cohesive overview of his visual arts practice from 2012 to 2025. This bilingual volume (Spanish/English) compiles a decade of transdisciplinary work, documenting the evolution of the artist’s conceptual exploration.
The catalogue centers on Reyes Araos’ enduring investigation into distance, light, and the complex relationships that bind the human, the natural, and the digital spheres. This exploration originates from a key experience during a residency in Shanghai in 2012, where the artist experienced remoteness by simultaneously witnessing the sunrise in Chile and the sunset in his room, mediated by a screen’s light. This realization led him to understand digitality as an immaterial architecture that alters the barriers of time and space, revealing that the natural and the artificial operate under the same invisible formula: the algorithm.
Foreign Skies documents a body of work in which the grammar of digital media functions as both metaphor and symbol. The book explores themes of technology, perception, affect, and human communication, spanning light installations, painting, and conceptual poetry.
The publication serves as a key document for understanding the artist’s trajectory, and includes Reyes Araos’ prologue and two critical essays by Julianne Cordray and Samuel Toro Contreras, who contextualize the work within contemporary thought and explore its biographical aspects.
This project was made possible by the generous funding from the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes (FONDART), Convocatoria 2025, Región de Antofagasta, Chile, del Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio.