This Is A Sensitive World | Carolina Muñoz

With a banana peel on the head. Among the works Carolina Muñoz has created in the past two years are those resulting from her strolls through the La Vega market, where, among vegetables, fruits, and the sale of umbrellas on rainy days, coexists a wide array of picturesque characters with no possibility of sale or rent. Muñoz observes, studies, and memorizes them, but something happens along the way between the market and her studio. Something sensitive. After a temporary stay within the artist's brain, the curious figures transform into art: a kind of perverted cartoon, unsure between beauty and ugliness, wavering between psychological tension and physical comedy. When translated into paintings, some recalled scenes find a second home: the "Centro de Expresiones" art gallery, a neutral space where the protagonists appear as living sculptures. Here, they lose their humanity, or perhaps the opposite: there is so much of it that it multiplies, repeats, radiates, detonates.

The residents of La Vega traveled with Carolina Muñoz to her residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. There (in the United States and the mind of the creator), they would meet with the beings that populate the "Abstract Behavior" series, inspired by street recordings of fentanyl addicts, a drug causing a global epidemic. A "sensitive" issue. The lifeless bodies of drug addicts indeed display abstract behavior: their limbs respond confusedly to mixed signals that may be of euphoria, desolation, stupor, or calmness. The mental short circuits caused by the substance lead to spasms and physical seizures, gestures and disconnected movements, and postures so bizarre they deserve to be displayed in vitrines or on pedestals. She and we ask the same question: What do they see? But above all, what do they feel? Do they feel, for instance, the colors? The yellows, reds, pinks, or blues that pass through, blur, burst from, or replace their heads? The dots, splashes, lines, and stains that surround them?

When all the senses focus on one touch, the city becomes a forest of feet and arms. The bodies decompose, recombine, twist, lose their attributes, and lose meaning due to - or thanks to - an excess of sensitivity.

The new works created after her return to Chile from New York narrate a fascination with outsider artist Henry Darger. The girls in Darger's paintings abandon that imagination to be adopted by Muñoz's new pastel-colored worlds, places where they will hear flowers whisper secrets or squeeze clouds to make another type of reality rain, or at least the reality they feel. We know it is a confusing reality, as confusing as their gender or sexual inclinations. We see games between tender and depraved, between grotesque and innocent. And movements that repeat, repeat, perhaps seeking that confirmation - this is happening - through insistence.

Because one thing is reality, and another is what you feel is reality. Turn around and look back to that central space that reveals the bodies of the other viewers. Then look at yourself: your hands, your feet. Now close your eyes. Touch your face, feel your right arm, lean over, lie down, caress your leg. What do you feel?