Works | Arnaldo Drés González

La Grieta (The Rift), 2025
Wood, acrylic, marker, terracotta, graphite, 131.8 × 109.2 × 8.4 cm

This assemblage reorganizes discarded wooden fragments collected from a workshop in Hyderabad (India) into a rigorous visual system that hovers between architectural object, extended drawing, and landscape. Graphic markings referencing industrial wheels, rooftops, and mountain ridges cut across the grain. An unreadable Hindi distribution stamp found on the wood is stripped of its linguistic function, treated purely as visual material, and extended into the composition through delicate drawing. An irregular, sharp opening punctures the frame, incorporating the physical gallery wall and structural absence as active elements within the composition. The work materializes the condition of displacement by turning structural residue into a liminal architecture.

Installation view, Topographies of Tents, Terracotta and Time, Srishti Art Gallery, India, 2025. Curated by Mathew Partridge

Troscurpos: De la Corona al Viento (From the Crown to the Wind), 2024-2026
Single-channel video, black and white, sound, 5:12 min

Troscurpos destabilizes the boundaries between body, memory, and geographic territory. A digitally fabricated lithographic image of an eroded crown emerges as an ambiguous archaeological trace, introducing a symbol whose history remains unresolved. Macro sequences of tactile gestures — hands interacting with skin, arms folding inward—dissolve the human figure into a fluid, shifting landscape. As the edit introduces elements of the sea, dense mist, and tarp-covered machinery, the body enters a state suspended between distinct historical and post-migratory temporalities. A soundscape of nocturnal insects, moving water, clashing chains, and resonant percussion expands the visual field, transforming the moving image into a physical atmosphere of heavy anticipation.

Screenings – 2026: Blackwood Filmfestival – Kurzfilmsause Freiburg, Freiburg (Germany) • STARPTELPA Riga Performance Festival (Latvia) • Public Shorts Video Festival, Berlin (Germany) – 2025: Special Mention – Festival de Cine de Villa De Leyva (Colombia) • T.I.V.A. Tirana International Video Art Festival (Albania) • KURZFILMTAG, KulturEnergieBunker, Hamburg (Germany) • Écran Libre New Media Festival (Canada) • WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Canada) • Speak Volumes, Out of the Blue Cinema, Paris (France) • Mientras tanto Cine (Uruguay) • Movement and Light, GISELA, Berlin (Germany) • Tendermesh Film Fest, Berlin (Germany) – 2024: Rare Effect Festival, Lisbon (Portugal) • Intermediaciones – Video Art and Experimental Video Showcase, Medellín (Colombia).

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The Core, 2026–ongoing
Moving image, digital archive, installation research, dimensions / spatial layout variable (2016–ongoing)

The Core emerges from an audiovisual investigation started in 2016 from a single recording of a bodily action. After years of digital editing, fragmentation, and intuitive manipulation without a prior script, isolating, slowing down, and recombining gestures until the original act became almost unrecognizable, the project resulted in 54 autonomous compositions (2020–21).

Presented as an open archive rather than isolated works, the artist explores the relationships between them through rhythm, scale, and spatial arrangement. The Core (Pulsations) Grid serves as a first provisional mapping of these interactions. The central question raised is whether an accumulated transformation of a single bodily source can give rise to a new visual language that was not perceptible in the original recording.

The Core (Pulsations) — Grid view, 2026-ongoing (silent)
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The Core (Pulsations) — Detail, 2026 (silent)
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Corporeo, 2020
3-channel video installation, color, black and white, sound, loop

This installation isolates close-up anatomical details—the movement of the throat and tongue — and strips them of their biological function. Enlarged and displaced, these bodily fragments manifest as geological formations, alien landscapes, or unfamiliar kinetic objects. Projected simultaneously across three channels, the images establish a tight physical dialogue with the architecture. The structural proximity of the loops ensures that the visual transformation on one screen immediately recontextualizes the adjacent images. The work treats the body not as a subject of representation, but as raw, malleable material that shifts the viewer’s spatial perception.

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Installation view, körpE[h]RLICH, xpon-art, Hamburg, 2020

From the series Lonas del Jardín, 2021-ongoing
Found construction tarp, acrylic paint, ink, marker, teip, rope, light, variable dimensions

Built from weathered construction tarps salvaged in Germany, this ongoing series operates as a body of site-adaptive installations. Each iteration preserves the material’s operational tears, stains, and structural repairs, allowing its physical history to reconfigure across different spatial environments. Graphic ink tracks and enlarged configurations of human fingers, alongside suggestive forms of heads or hands, intersect with industrial markings, tracing bodily residues across the surfaces. Suspended, folded, or pooling onto the floor, the tarps function simultaneously as image, object, and spatial volume. Through variations in gravity, structural tension, and light, the series continuously adapts to its architectural contexts — transforming utilitarian surfaces into immersive environments of shelter and exposure.

Installation view, Historische Zehntscheune Stadthagen, Germany, 2022

Resguardo y Presencia (Shelter and Presence), 2012–ongoing
Video and photo-actions, textile, variable dimensions

Resguardo y Presencia is an ongoing inquiry into concealment as a state of psychological refuge and physical boundary. Across distinct iterations — ranging from open-air video-performances activated by wind and bodily tension to atemporal, static textile displays within physical spaces — a persistent gesture remains: the body enveloped, sheltered, or altered by fabric. The material acts as an adaptive skin that redrafts human contours, transforming the subject into an ambiguous volume. Neither an act of complete disappearance nor a passive disguise, the series positions shelter as a deliberate, tactical retreat into self-contained autonomy.

Exhibition view, Resguardo y Presencia, Künstlerhaus Vorwerk-Stift Hamburg, 2022

Resguardo, 2022
Textile, chair, variable dimensions

Resguardo y Presencia - acción n 1, 2015
Single-channel video, color, sound, 5:19 min
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