Overtrained, debuting at Art Basel Hong Kong, expands on Cayetano Ferrer's ongoing exploration of the inheritances of visual culture, morphologies and misappropriations of historical forms. The machine-carved sculptural objects of Overtrained – ornate capitals, a veiled bust and relief tablets, in varied coloured stone – materialise Ferrer's investigation into the relationship between technologies of the future and formal legacies of the past. They are presented with the newest iteration of Ferrer's signature carpet works, constructed from fragments of reclaimed dead-stock casino carpet, sets of patterns referencing motifs from across art and design histories collaged into an imaginary architectural foundation. Working with a custom text-to-image diffusion model fine-tuned on the archives of museum collections, Ferrer found that it became "overfit" on the dataset: having learned its training data too precisely, the model verges on breakdown and incoherence. This excessive training on a limited dataset produces distinctive distortions, where concepts in the visual archive bleed into one another. The resulting outputs, dense with visual references and incomplete logics, open up a gulf between the recognisable and the comprehensible. Familiar cultural profiles spanning centuries and continents, such as sculptural busts and column capitals, are pushed, stretched and ultimately untethered from the associations and assumptions with which one might approach them. The work raises questions about what is lost when archival structures are dissolved into statistical relations, and about the forms that emerge from a collapse of the distinctions on which historical meaning depends. Ferrer’s carpet collage forms a unifying ground across the booth and echoes the sculptures’ allusions to disparate art historical periods and styles, creating an associative space reminiscent of a ruin’s foundations. Outlines of rooms, floor mosaics and architectural fragments are pieced together in motifs adjacent to foliage, stone and ponds. In Ferrer's practice, found materials and architectural remnants act as vehicles for unpacking the distinctions between high and low culture; authentic and speculative; historical fact and wild invention. Overtrained builds on these concerns to examine recent technological and philosophical debates posed by non-human logics operating within the sphere of cultural creation and heritage.

ABOUT ARTISTS : Cayetano Ferrer

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Cayetano Ferrer (b. Honolulu, USA. Lives and works in New York) uses remnants and fragments both ancient and contemporary to develop sculptural work, video and installation. Playing with and distorting forms derived from architecture, ruin and museological display methods, Ferrer’s work interacts with and challenges the space it inhabits. In splicing and reconfiguring objects across a broad spectrum of materials, Ferrer disrupts the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art; fact and fiction; history and modernity. Solo exhibitions include Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, USA (2026 and 2019); Southard Reid, London, UK (2018); Podium, Oslo, Norway (2018); Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA (2015); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, USA (2014). Selected group exhibitions include Chez Max et Dorothea, Los Angeles, USA (2024); Barbati Gallery, Venice, Italy (2023); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholme, Sweden (2021); Centre d’art Contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, France (2019); Yuz Museum Shanghai, China (2019); Henie Onstad, Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway and ICA Phildalphia, USA (2017); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard, NY (2015); Swiss Institute, NY, USA (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2012). Ferrer was awarded a 2015 Art & Technology Lab grant from Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in 2013 was an Artadia Awardee for visual art. His work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (MAC3).

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Art Basel Hong Kong

Convention & Exhibition Centre 1 Harbour Road Wan Chai Hong Kong, China

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March 27 > 29, 2026

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