On the cusp of opening his first solo Australian exhibition after decades of painting, creating, teaching, puppet-making, and writing, is beloved Argentine-Fish Creeker (via Melbourne, and Barcelona) Gonzalo Varela.
"The Second Horizon" opens Saturday, 28 March at 4pm at Berninneit Art Gallery on Phillip Island, showcasing thirty works that ask uncomfortable questions about what happens when biology, technology and artificial intelligence merge into something we might not recognise as human anymore.
Varela, who settled in Fish Creek six years ago after a decade in Barcelona and fifteen years bouncing around Australia, describes himself as a "slow-cooking creator" – someone who values the dialogue with his work, embracing "both the battle and the dance with it." This patience shows in paintings that don't offer easy answers, instead presenting bodies in states of mutation, expansion and decay.
"If memories, thoughts and actions can be transferred into data, what will that reading format be like?" Varela asks. "Will memories be translated into images? How will we distinguish real memories from imagined ones?"
These aren't idle philosophical musings. The exhibition explores transhumanism's pursuit of immortality through cybernetic expansion and consciousness uploading, set against backdrops of digital totalitarian states, hyper-surveillance, and the slow erosion of privacy we're already living through. The traditional human figure dissolves into something unknown – part flesh, part machine, part digital residue.
For an artist whose degree came from the National University of La Plata in Buenos Aires, who won a Green Room Award for Best Puppet Show in 2018, and whose short stories appear in "A Voz Limpia," an anthology of Latin American writers in Melbourne, this exhibition represents both a homecoming and a departure. Varela's artistic practice is deeply rooted in painting, but he's also explored muralism, sculpture, puppetry and writing – all providing "alternative ways to express his storytelling impulse."
"Restless and ambitious by nature," he says of himself, "I refuse to be trapped by the echo of a good idea or the repetition of a successful formula. I prefer to open doors fearlessly, even if I sometimes forget to close them."
Those open doors have led to works in private and public collections across Argentina, Spain, the United States, Germany and Australia. But it's taken until now, in his adopted home of South Gippsland, to gather these unsettling visions into a solo show that asks whether the post-human form represents evolution or extinction.
In his creative process, Varela carefully considers the temperature of colors, the creation of depth, and how a "happy accident" can disrupt the harmony of a composition. For him, the creative process is what truly matters – "not a race to the finish line." He sees his paintings as "a natural outcome of the act of making."
"The Second Horizon" runs through 17 May at Berninneit Art Gallery, Phillip Island. The opening reception is Saturday, 28 March at 4pm.
