ArtForum
In “sub rosa,” his second solo exhibition at this gallery, Karlos Gil stimulates a dialectical relationship between craftsmanship and technology. The tapestries and sculptures here evoke the logic of productivity raised by nineteenth-century biologist Wojciech Jastrzebowski and his pioneering thesis on ergonomics, which Gil has methodically incorporated into his output since the beginning of his incipient and promising career.
If ergonomics is the concept here, punch cards are the tool. They lie at once at the heart of a pretechnological era (they were used by Joseph Marie Jacquard for weaving looms in the nineteenth century and eventually inspired the first IBM punch cards and systems for digital computing) and extend to today’s manufacturing roar. For his tapestry series “Stay Gold,” 2015, Gil has turned to an industrial replica of a Jacquard loom to rework etchings of nature by Jastrzebowski, whose ideal of optimized productivity had a somewhat arcadian substance. By blowing up images of leaves to make the work’s weave more noticeable, procedures of yesterday and today are sharply blended.
https://www.artforum.com/events/karlos-gil-209100/
Six sculptures, which Gil calls “object ideograms,” are also on view. They evoke the thick foam used to for packing electronic appliances, but they are cast with materials ranging from resins to plaster or stone. They are miraculously piled on top of each other, bringing to mind models for complex architecture. In addition, songs from exotica records of the 1950s and ’60s gently echo in the gallery. These seem intended to create a pleasant mood, one in which images, objects, and viewers are set to perform at their best.