Mario Arroyave Colombia, b. 1983

Mario Arroyave's interest in photography began empirically at age 13. While living in Costa Rica and Colombia, his vocation continued to grow alongside his studies and work in systems engineering and advertising. In 2010 he launched his career as an artist, exhibiting publicly for the first time in Bogotá. 

Since then, his career has been on the rise. In the past few years, Arroyave has attained national recognition and established himself as one of the young artists whose work revolves around photographic languages. He has participated in solo and group shows in numerous cities including Bogotá, Medellín, Lima, Sao Paulo, Miami, Dallas, New York and Tokyo. 

Arroyave's work arises from a combination of physics and computing concepts, exploring the body's relationship with space and the human interactions that occur over time. It captures social and archetypal patterns through an angular lens, detaching individuals from their defining daily interactions and placing them in vacant spaces where time disappears, transforming them into a great human fabric. With this, he portrays humanity from an elevated perspective. 

In contrast to exploring humanity as a macrosystem, Arroyave develops intimate dialogues and generates immersive works that encourage introspection, thus proposing a conversation between macro and micro that seeks to blur the binary difference and show the eternal evolution in which we are immersed.

TIMELINE

"Timeline," the artist's most extense and recognized series, reflects this temporary non-existence, generating a notion of time-space from interactions of people or objects that inhabit or interact in a given space. In this way vast landscapes are created that expand said space as a result of the accumulation of the interactions that are generated within it, and these, in turn, are synthesized in a single timeless moment.

HUMAN FABRIC

Quantum physics describes the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, and it is always a challenge to translate this to our level of perception. To approach it from an artistic perspective, art being a science of effects and affections, the artist must appeal to the viewers' senses as opposed to their reason.

The "Human Fabric" series is born from thoughtfully observing the matter that composes us.  It is an interpretation of the theories of quantum physics that lead us to where all atoms vibrate and cluster, to exist briefly before becoming others. It is a clean and contemplative work that can take us to places of anguish or tranquility. It is in this ambivalence that we can find the power to generate new ideas about our own existence.

DISSECTIONS OF THE INFINITE

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

-William Blake

Reality is articulated like a kaleidoscope of diverse infinites, some larger than others, that occur indefinitely under multiple frequencies, where each atom contains an eternity within itself. As human beings, we live within a metric system that begins with our perception of time and spreads through the limits of what is known to us. The implicit myopia of the lens through which we are taught to see restrains the infinity of the present, which only exists outside the past and the future. Dissections of the Infinite seeks to approach that limitless space that exists within us. As Kundera states: "If you are looking for infinity, just close your eyes".