Dialéctica del Vacío: Forma y Percepción
The Sonora Museum of Art proudly presents Dialectic of the Void: Form and Perception, the first institutional solo exhibition in Mexico by Vienna-based artist Andrés Ramírez Gaviria. Spanning works from 2010 to 2024, the exhibition explores the interplay between material and immaterial forms, offering a profound meditation on presence, absence, and the fluidity of time and space.
Gaviria’s practice investigates the cracks and ambiguities in systems of meaning—from science and technology to history, time, and mysticism. His works illuminate the poetic and enigmatic dimensions of these frameworks, reshaping cultural references through translations, associations, and reenactments. Often juxtaposing opposing ideas—rational and intuitive, structured, and chaotic—Gaviria’s work challenges familiar paradigms, inspiring curiosity and introspection.
A highlight of the exhibition is Solid Objects, a monumental sculpture resembling playful children’s building blocks. Based on a 1963 computer-generated drawing from Sketchpad—a pioneering program by Dr. Ivan Sutherland at MIT Lincoln Laboratory—the work first appears as a barrier obstructing access to the exhibition. Visitors must navigate around it to uncover its full form. By transforming this obscure digital relic into a tangible structure, Gaviria ventures the question: What could be a suitable monument for a computer program?
In Mental Radio, Gaviria revisits the speculative connections between science and the supernatural, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1930 book of the same name. Collaborating with his wife, he created ink drawings that re-enact Sinclair’s telepathy experiments.
In 0., what initially appears as a static black square reveals itself to be a sealed glass cube. Hidden within, a vacuum pump gradually extracts air, creating a moment of implosion that redefines the void—not as emptiness, but as a dynamic space brimming with potential. Humor and irony underpin Formula, though which Gaviria reconstructs Nikolai Punin’s 1919 mathematical equation for creativity. Both sincere and absurd, the piece offers a playful synthesis of imagination and logic.
Gaviria’s work explores the fluid intersections of history, culture, and meaning, where stories constantly evolve, their boundaries shifting in an endless interplay of beginnings and endings. By focusing on and probing the ambiguities of systematic methodologies, he constructs an ever-shifting dialogue about the processes through which meaning is created.
The exhibition is curated by Octavio Avendaño Trujillo, Director of the Sonora Museum of Art.
