New Fog brings together a constellation of works by Karlos Gil in which light, bodies and obsolete technologies appear as residues of an exhausted future. Taking the nocturnal city as both image and system, the exhibition unfolds through recycled neon, moving image and sculpture to explore how desire, commerce and technological memory continue to circulate after the infrastructures that produced them have begun to disappear.
At the centre of the project is De–Extinction, a series made from fragments of industrial neon signs recovered from urban advertising systems and later displaced by LED technology.
Preserving the original glass, gas and colour of these endangered luminous bodies, Gil reanimates them as archaeological remains of a vanished economy of signs. Once designed to attract, seduce and orient bodies through the city, these fragments now return as coded organisms: broken commercial signals, luminous fossils from a disappearing visual regime.
The exhibition’s title, New Fog, refers not only to nightlife or consumption, but to a wider condition: a world in which attention, desire, and perception remain permanently active. In this nocturnal regime, light becomes a form of circulation. Urban signage produces an atmosphere where the boundaries between human and machine, memory and simulation become unstable.
This instability is expanded in Uncanny Valley, Gil’s dystopian science-fiction film based on the encounter between an android and its human double. Developed through research with the Ishiguro Laboratory and robotics research centres in Japan, the work reflects on animism, artificial intelligence and the disturbing threshold at which technological resemblance becomes emotional rejection. The film introduces a post-human consciousness into the exhibition: a cinematic body suspended between empathy and estrangement.
In dialogue with these luminous and cinematic systems, a sculpture from the series Phantom Limbs appears as the physical residue of another technological body. Cast from the protective packaging of electronic devices, the work transforms disposable industrial foam into bronze, turning cavities and ergonomic voids into durable sculptural presences. What was once designed to protect machines becomes a fossil of contact between the human hand and electronic life.
Together, these works form an economy of nocturnal remains. The neons no longer advertise; they persist as memories. The android no longer imitates; it reflects the fragility of recognition itself. The bronze sculpture no longer protects an object; it preserves the shape of its disappearance. Across the exhibition, Gil composes a landscape in which obsolete technologies behave like living matter, and where the city’s artificial lights become symptoms of deeper relations between bodies, images, and machines.
Karlos Gil (Talavera, 1984) explores the entanglement between nature, technology and time through a sculptural and spatial practice. By creating atmospheric conditions rather than representational spaces, his work examines moments in which natural, technological and historical processes cease to behave as expected.
His practice examines the complex and often contradictory ways in which human beings relate with the natural world, layering his artworks with encrypted stories from science fiction, occultism, underground culture, mythology and industrial and biological evolution.
Gil uses the exhibition itself as his medium, amplifying or re-circuiting the characteristics of the context and constructing an interdependency between the work and its host.
Karlos Gil studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the Schools of Fine Arts in Lisbon and Madrid, completing his PhD in 2016. His work has been shown internationally at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Paris; HKW, Berlin; NTU CCA Singapore; Gasworks, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; TANK, Shanghai; Centro Botín, Santander; and CA2M, Madrid, as well as at the III Moscow Biennale and the XVIII Lyon Biennale.
