GARABATO
Ramon Brito (Venezuela)
Garabato is a Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges film, production design, and visual arts. For nearly fifteen years, he has developed a body of work centered on the transformation of a single material: the aluminum can. Through a meticulous process of manual recycling and sculptural reconstruction, he turns this everyday discarded object into poetic matter—one that reflects on time, consumption, and memory.
His creative philosophy is simple yet profound: “Trash can be a treasure.”
Each piece goes through a process of recovery, crushing, and rebuilding, where recycled aluminum becomes the very soul of the artwork. The goal is not merely to reuse, but to transmute—to turn residue into a symbol of endurance, beauty, and transformation.
Garabato has intervened in public and private spaces in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, Caracas, and Bombay (India), where he lived for six months developing sculptural projects in dialogue with local contexts. There, he created his first recycled-can elephant, a symbol of memory and collective strength.
Years later, he revisited that same figure in Miami, where a second elephant remains in his studio—a work in progress that embodies the ongoing evolution of both material and artist.
His work extends beyond three-dimensional form. In the pictorial realm, Garabato uses the can as a visual module and recurring metaphor. He repeats, deconstructs, and reconfigures it to create compositions in murals, paintings, and collages, exploring accumulation and rhythm as visual language. This same logic expands into the audiovisual field, where he has produced 2D and 3D animations made with real cans, further connecting object and movement, matter and time.
Throughout his career, Garabato has participated in both solo and group exhibitions, consolidating a body of work that exists between industrial aesthetics and human sensitivity. His cinematic eye infuses each piece—sculptural or pictorial—with a visual narrative in which light, space, and texture converse with the viewer.
In his practice, aluminum ceases to be waste and becomes testimony. Garabato transforms the ephemeral into the enduring, inviting us to witness the regenerative power of art and the beauty that emerges from what the world discards.