Review: Oscar Muñoz in Toronto
Oscar Muñoz Line of Destiny 2006 Video still
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Oscar Muñoz Line of Destiny 2006 Video still |
The work of Oscar Muñoz was the highlight of curator Robert Storr’s Venice Biennale last summer. The preponderance of politically and socially minded artworks and videos in the Arsenale at times seemed like a walk-through version of CNN—images from global trouble spots dulled to a unidimensional sameness that tended to counter the urgency of the subject matter. Muñoz’s quiet restraint was an effective exception. In his five-screen projection work Project for a Memorial (2005) a hand quickly paints portraits using brush and water on stone. As the hand and brush move from screen to screen, the images evaporate to become an extended display of disappearance based on newspaper obituaries in Cali, Colombia, where the artist lives. It is a neat inversion of the usual dynamics of media imagery. Instead of declarative, saturated, high-tension images, Muñoz offers water, a fading and palpable appreciation of human loss.
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Oscar Muñoz Project for a Memorial 2005 |
Now Project for a Memorial is part of “Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial,” a touring exhibition by Colombian curator José Roca, who includes 11 other recent and early works to make a concise survey of Muñoz’s art that could have easily graced a major public gallery instead of two relatively modest artist-run venues. Still, such modesty suits Muñoz. His tightly themed, intractable art deals with the vanishing point of images. He isolates a condition where they hover on the edge of nothing, as in Line of Destiny (2006), a video showing shifting water in a cupped hand that catches the intermittent reflection of the artist’s face. In Intervals (While I breathe) (2004) portraits are burned into paper with the end of a cigarette, and seared holes are the means of rendering the image.
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Oscar Muñoz Biographies 2002 |
In another work, the room-sized installation Ambulatorio (1994–2003), you walk across broken glass to peer down at aerial photos of Cali. The view is technocratic and surveillant, and Muñoz makes clear that it is a crushed and broken lens of scrutiny. For him, the world resolves in the form of non-heroic individual portraits, faces usually linked to conditions of duress. In the video installation Biographies (2002), faces drawn with loose pigment dissolve in water, lose form, go down the drain and then re-emerge. They are suspended in a fluid medium with its own gravitational imperatives, a lovely and apt metaphor for the human condition, time and memory.
With his humanist bias, Muñoz, like Alfredo Jaar, another South American artist, reminds us that images are fallible, human constructions with social implications. They are not restricted to the ever-improving technologies of mass media and its ever-narrowing usage. His images are the antithesis of Pop: they offer a tactile trace to a subject, not just a mirroring of appearance. In this they resist the drift of a dominant culture to opt for a more intimate scale of engagement. But it is an intimacy that registers in work after work by Muñoz as apart and alone and on the verge of extinction. He renews our idea of the volatility and vulnerability of the images we make—and also of our place inside them.
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