Final Fantasy: Karlos Gil

In Final Fantasy, Karlos Gil proposes a sensorial and reflective journey through landscapes in which matter itself questions our conventional idea of the future. Each space reveals a different stage of this journey that traverses concepts such as fantasy, contemporary ruins, science fiction, geology, and time as an active and transformative force in order to create a new technological romanticism.

The exhibition begins with TIMEFALL, an immersive environment of accelerated aging in which the pieces are subjected to chemical and atmospheric processes that gradually erode them. Day after day, the works change and degrade, showing that time is not a static framework, but a constant sculptor that shapes and redefines the visible. This process of physical decomposition generates debris that is recycled into pigments to create SPECTRE, a series of drawings that evoke "technological hauntologies," ghostly visions of specters of the future that are hinted at but never fully consolidated.

In the main gallery, VORTEX takes us to the unknown interior of Icelandic hydrothermal volcanoes through heliography, an ancient photographic technique that uses sunlight to capture images. Paradoxically, this solar technique captures underwater spaces submerged in absolute darkness. The images, printed on aluminum plates treated with thermochromic patinas, react to the passing of the day, varying their colors according to the intensity and quality of the outside light, transforming into a true atmospheric thermometer that connects the exterior with an inaccessible and mysterious interior. These pieces react to the position of the sun, absorbing the wave frequencies specific to that moment, making them impossible to replicate and generating a completely handcrafted work that blurs the boundaries between alchemy and magic.

The sculptural installation TERMINAL emerges as a material and conceptual counterpoint. An abandoned modular walkway is recontextualized within the gallery space as a poetic landscape, evoking the desolate beauty of the lava fields near Námaskarð in Iceland. These types of structures—typically used to protect both visitors and fragile terrain in geothermally active zones—are here presented as relics of a suspended function, stripped of utility and reimagined as vestiges of an unrealized infrastructure. TERMINAL thus unfolds as a romantic landscape in ruins, conjuring visions of abandoned futures and speculative worlds. It invites not only fantasy, but also a contemplative drift through layers of time—technological, geological, and psychological. Isolated and recomposed, these fragmented forms resonate with the aesthetics of science fiction and the sublime, offering a silent meditation on temporality, obsolescence, and the unseen systems that shape our immediate reality.

AFTERLIFE is a generative audiovisual installation that offers a technological meditation on memory and the perception of the landscape. Landscapes filmed in different locations around the world are handed over to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t simply reproduce them, but dreams, reorganizes, and reinvents them endlessly. The landscape thus becomes a suspended organism, sensitive to the presence of the viewer, breathing, mutating, and forgetting, like a memory that cannot be fully fixed. As in Romanticism, the landscape here is not simply nature, but a mirror of human interiority: immeasurable, elusive, profoundly unstable. However, where the Romantic traveler found the abyss of his solitude, the viewer of AFTERLIFE finds a living system: a technological memory that tirelessly rewrites its own past. Artificial intelligence, far from freezing the world in a still image, dreams the landscapes, like someone remembering a place that no longer exists. At this intersection of Romanticism and technology, the landscape is no longer a territory, but rather a deep time; no longer an object of contemplation, but a subject of transformation.

Collectively, Final Fantasy works question our notions of the future and contemporary ruin, exploring how technology and fantasy intersect in our relationship with time and the environment. Here, the landscape ceases to be merely decorative and becomes a liquid, malleable, and living dimension. The material on display is presented not only as a testament to the wear and tear of time, but as an opportunity to imagine new narratives that constantly emerge among the ruins and fragments of the present. Ultimately, Final Fantasy confronts us with the wreckage of tomorrow, while inviting us to continue dreaming of other possible futures.

Presentation (EN)

Apresentação (PT)