Dario Robleto
Julia Featheringill
Born 1972, San Antonio, Texas; lives in Houston, Texas
Sparrows Sing to an Indifferent Sea, 2019; Earliest waveform recordings of inhalation and blood flowing from the heart during various auditory experiences (1876-96), rendered and 3-D printed in brass-plated stainless steel; lacquered maple, 23k gold leaf; Box (closed): 2 1/4 x 23 x 23 inches/5.7 x 58.4 cm; With pedestal and vitrine: 45 x 50 3/4 x 30 inches/114.3 x 128.9 x 76.2 cm
Among his roster of inventions and achievements, German physiologist Karl von Vierordt, in 1854, produced the first visual tracings of the human pulse. A short strand of human hair was the stylus that would then trace the white curvilinear forms on a piece of soot-covered paper on a rotating drum, the earliest form of charting blood pressure. The resulting delicate tracings are images of life force itself.
Dario Robleto has based a body of work on these amazing early pieces of data. He translates the line recorded by the stylus, drawn by translating the beat of a heart into a visual pattern, into brass ribbons. He tranmutes the ineffable into material and in choosing the precious metal, and elegantly presenting the line as jewelry of a sort, dignifies this evidence of lived life and infers its preciousness.
The arts, humanities, and sciences come together in Dario Robleto’s work. Astrophysics, paleontology, poetry, and DJ culture, have been catalysts and partners. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York are among the institutions that hold his work in their permanent collections. He has been a research fellow or artist-in- residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the SETI Institute, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland.