Report: On the exhibition This Is a Sensitive World by Carolina Muñoz
Carolina Muñoz presents the exhibition This Is a Sensitive World, the result of her first place in the 7th edition of the CCU Art Fellowship, which invites contemporary Chilean artists to compete for a residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and a solo exhibition at PROXYCO Gallery, both in New York City. I was invited to participate as a curator for the fellowship in general and as a mentor for the winning artist. Through conversations and several emails, the artist proposed her work, its layout, and the viewer's tour, creating her own axis, a curatorship. In this text, I reflect on her work, the exhibition, and the dialogues throughout the process.
The title I use for this piece is "report," a word that is multiple and open, but at the same time urgent and provocative: "I must deliver a report," a slice of time to communicate the state of a process. In the visual arts, there is the term Informalism, Art Informel or Art Autre to refer to a post-war artistic movement (both World War II and the Spanish Civil War) and, according to art historiography, it defines a type of artwork that exalts the personality of the artist, chance and improvisation, and that materially uses oil as its material - concentrated, dripped, in impasto and with the presence of cracks. It is a painting linked to existentialist currents, with its European side in the Informalist movement and its backside in the American world through Abstract Expressionism with its liberating psychism.
It is interesting that a Chilean artist dedicated to painting should generate direct and indirect connections and interactions with this movement and that the origins of an international movement should be so close to the context of her own country. Its main figures: Roberto Matta, born in Santiago, was the bearer of the artistic knowledge derived from Surrealism to the American Abstract Expressionists; and José Balmes, born in Catalonia, who arrived in Chile as a refugee at the age of twelve and became a Chilean in his twenties, a pioneer of the Informalism that reshaped modern art in Chile through the Signo group. Both are fundamental parts of the ideas of art in parallel with the international world, installing form, abstraction and the creation of new worlds - along with the weight of painting and its materiality - at the core, influencing painters of the 1980s and persisting in different generations to the present day.
Carolina Muñoz is an artist focused on painting, but in her creative process, she observes and cuts out the world through images to create scenes through digital montages. One is the art world in museums, galleries, fairs and spaces that serve as a white, simple and neutral background so that her figures, based on people and works of art, take center stage. The artist disarticulates them, abstracting them and giving them an expressionist character, showing strange effigies that are, in her words, "ambiguous, grotesque and cartoonish."
The white cube is the axis, the space, the place where art meets. An invention of the 1960s that sought spatial neutrality regarding the work of art: if everything is white, everything can be seen in detail; or, as Klein experimented in his intervention in a gallery, painting it completely white and revealing that art is everywhere. This experiment, incomprehensible without its history, has plenty of logic. Art is not only the piece but everything surrounding it, from the professionals to the unwary observer wondering if what they see is art or not. It is a place of socializing, conversations, frictions and glances that worship an artifact that transcends prices and rules to reach its maximum level. Muñoz observes this ecosystem by painting the background - in this case, the white, neutral space - and the figures, which she abstracts and reformulates, assembling novel bodies with a rigid trunk whose limbs multiply and transform. This figuration and painting style is rooted in the early painters, both in Matta's beings made of human parts - such as feet, legs, mouths, and fingers - and in Balmes's painting, which plays with its own matter. Muñoz's twist is that she shows something abstract but recognizable, something unknown but seen. A collector, a gallerist, an artist and a work of art unfolding and forming something new: a many-legged body, one eye sprouting another, an arm stretching out to infinity. They are fleshy, bruised, pale. We don't know if they are integrating or disintegrating - the only evidence is tactile.
Touch is the main derivative of this exhibition. We see with our eyes and touch with our hands, but here it is the other way around: the hands see, and the eyes touch. As viewers, we are transformed into the subtle experience of the artist, witnessing characters struck by a sensation, a fraction of time that we can only experience through each painting. Is it the suspended movement? The idea of being human from another perspective? The experience of the body before the senses? Carolina Muñoz's work raises so many questions that, when we observe it, more appear and repeat themselves, just like her figures. They question what we speak, feel, and are not only in the world of art but also in our physical condition, which knows the world through its limited senses. Muñoz's Informalism takes us into her perception outside the established, not by resorting to dreams or utopias like the Informalists, but to the idea of a new humanity, a product of social and technological changes that open up new ways of understanding and inventing what we consider to be real.
Gonzalo Pedraza, curator and artist.
July 2024.
July 2024.
