The period of the Salons, masterfully covered by Diderot's pen, definitively defined the artistic audience. The search for surprises, the spirit of controversy, the aesthetic confrontation as a political issue is clearly outlined in the late eighteenth century. The art public, turned into a historical subject. A contemporary tradition - which includes photographers and painters - has turned its attention to it. From the particular nature of its sociology to the curiosities that the interaction of people and works generate. Here we can find one of the branches of Carolina Muñoz's family tree in this exhibition. Her characters roam the artistic space, perhaps as actors in a performance, perhaps as monsters of contemporary culture, waiting for something new or starring in a grotesque incident.
Something as uncertain as their own physical condition, their own presence, because the cutting and gluing procedures –which characterise Ms Muñoz's works– have been exacerbated and her characters suffer the consequences. Faces of realistic features are inserted violently against bodies sometimes made up of colour plains that only describe their silhouette. Animated characters complete the scene or appear as undesirable excrescences on their bodies. The Northern Renaissance of which their anatomies are heirs collides against a pop universe, stemming from recent animation. The formula extremes elements of pop, while also continuing in an anomalous way a tradition that seemed interrupted: the neofiguration.
The attitudes of Carolina Muñoz's characters do little to naturalism; on the contrary, they behave as people do today in front of the camera. Their figures are children of social media. The artist reviews images from Instagram and other platforms in which different communities, some gay, give away their privacy to the public gaze. But nothing is so simple. The subjects do not innocently surrender to the digital gaze. Far from revealing their intimacy, they build a public image that disappoints the voyeur gaze. There is no truth revealed by the camera, just a pose. Far from the truth, what the viewer obtains is the caricature of their own desires.
In their intricate set of references and quotations, these works by Carolina Muñoz affirm with humour and virtuosity an artistic investigation that -with no doubt- must be taken very seriously.
César Gabler, curator.
