Oscar Muñoz, the artist who tries to capture absence

How to represent absence? How to give substance to something that cannot be seen? This is one of the themes that resonates in the works of the Colombian artist Oscar Munoz (Popayán, 1951). We see it in the empty frames of Domestic I (2013-2016) who welcome us to their exhibition at the carlier gallery | Gebauer from Madrid. There are eight pieces of marble of different shapes and sizes that could be in the hall of any house, except that the essential thing is missing: the portraits.

The other part of your work has to do with the photographic medium, which never tires of putting it to the test, also focusing on design, installation and video. Hasselblad Award in 2018, his search for other almost alchemical forms approaching the image, he took it to the self-portrait with charcoal dust, one of his fetishistic materials. He left it in vessels filled with water, in which the image appeared as the liquid evaporated.

He also experimented with grease, printing figures on a mirror that only become visible to us when we breathe on them. And he drew with water on a slab in the sun a face that, when it dries, disappears. All this makes us think about the durability of graphic documents and also how the image clings to the support in the same way that memories anchor themselves in our memory. Sometimes with some difficulty. And that's what the other installation in the exhibition is about, The collector (2014 – 2016), one of the pieces that made the most rounds after passing through the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

The search for other almost alchemical ways of approaching the image led him to self-portrait with coal dust, one of his fetishistic materials.

In the already dark room, we only see a horizon of portraits, Muñoz's favorite genre. Several projections run from one side to the other on the wall and a person, the artist himself, appears like a ghost and moves the images from one place to another as if he were a film editor, arranging them in an order that we do not fully understand. . to understand. Among the faces we recognize art history paintings and film stillsas well as family members of the artist and photographs that seem to be taken from newspapers and that make us think of missing people.

In this expanded autobiography, the papers – of different sizes, almost postcards – overlap and function as small, intimate canvases. With each new movement, the sound of paper handling is perceived in a subtle way, which is not without its charm, at a time when we are used to swiping [digital] images with a single finger on our cell phone.

[We are bodies]

It's been a long time since we've seen Oscar Muñoz individually in Spain, where, on the other hand, he's done a lot. The last, and very complete, was at Fundação Sorigué in 2017, two years after his time at Tabacalera (2015). Now return to Madrid with the help of Galeria Carlier | gebauer in this Berlin space's attempt to show the work of artists from outside of here – remember the previous exhibition by laure prouvost- it's from take control of a portfolio of national artists.

Luis Gordillo already active in its ranks, and has just signed Leonor Serrano. An encouraging point for this topic that we talk about so much: the internationalization of Spanish art.

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