Icaro Zorbar: “Estuvimos ahí”

November 26 – December 22 of 2009

It is an honour for Galería Casas Riegner to present the first solo show of Colombian artist Icaro Zorbar. The show, made of diverse and elaborate installations of images, sound and objects, is a collection of meditations around themes of love, about our different ways to measure time, and about reproduction media and its changing qualities when broadcasting human feelings.

Icaro Zorbar’s practice reaches different fields, researching the creation of hybrid machines, made with old and new found parts and with obsolete and current technologies, all fractured and transformed by the passage of time.
It directs our attention towards reproduction devices (turntables, music boxes, slide projectors, sound systems) and to its bizarre ability to freeze time and hold it frozen almost indefinitely, for as long as the electricity permits so.
But the subtle gestures of his pieces suggest that in the freezing of these reproduced sounds or images, there are always variations found. Dust, quality alterations, unexpected noise, imperfections, small failiures, that inevitably attract nostalgia.
A scratched vinyl will spin a thousand times and its song of unrequited love will sound sadder and sadder every time, as its technology deteriorates. In this acceptance of the intrinsic failure of technology, the artist finds sadly sweet, intensely human qualities.
He points to our strange habit of finding subjective conditions in objects, having us moved by seeing a solitary music box, wandering tortuously across the universe, playing its sound until it winds down.

He invites the visitor to contribute to, to “attend” his installations, conceding him the power to determine how much life to activate in each piece and for how long.
He invites us to be there and he reminds us that our attention will guide what feelings will come out of these simple, material, apparently inert machines.

Icaro Zorbar was born in Bogotá in 1977, where he currently lives. His works have been shown individually at Teorética in Costa Rica and at Bergen & Volt Gallery in Norway. He has been part of importantes group show such as The Generational, Younger than Jesus at the New Museum in New York, Interrogating Systems Grants and Commissions at Cisneros Fontanals Art Fundation in Miami, Asimetrías y Convergencias in Galería Vermelho in Sao Paulo and Sincronías, at the Museo de Arte Moderno. Buenos Aires, Argentina, among others.