Philagrafika 2010 Signature Edition, Óscar Muñoz' Ante la imagen (confronting the image), (2009)Posted October 8th, 2009 at 12:43:00pm

Philagrafika is proud to present the first in a series of commissioned, limited-edition, signature prints, by artists who are participating in the Philagrafika 2010 festival:

Óscar Muñoz' Ante la imagen (Confronting the Image), (2009).

Oscar Muñoz is one of the most fascinating artists working today on the subject of memory in relation to the photographic image. The images in Muñoz' work continually oscillate between presence and absence, stability and decay, alluding to the ephemeral nature of human existence, memory and history.

Muñoz's oeuvre defies media characterization, moving freely between and among photography, printmaking, drawing, installation, video and sculpture, effectively blurring the boundaries between these practices through his use of innovative processes: screenprinting on water; drawing with a cigarette; engraving a dot-matrix pattern with a wood-burning tool; or requiring the visitor to breathe on seemingly blank mirrors to reveal discretely printed portraits. The expressive power of his work is as grounded in the intrinsic qualities of the materials he employs as in the poetic associations they embody.
 
Ante la imagen,(Confronting the image)  created especially for PHILAGRAFIKA 2010, is the result of Muñoz’ ongoing contemplation of the photographic image and its apparent inability to live up to the memory of a particular person, since the photograph, a fixed representation, cannot fully capture the fluxuations of the human spirit.

This piece was made by etching the reflective surface of a mirror. The etched image is a male portrait, but unlike many of Muñoz’ previous works ( such as his Narcissus series), the portrait is not of himself. Here the artist has appropriated an historical image, allegedly the first ever photographic image of a human being: the self-portrait daguerreotype of Philadelphia chemist Robert Cornelius, made just two months after Daguerre’s invention had been revealed to the world, and inscribed in Cornelius’s handwriting (on the back):“The first light picture ever taken, 1839”.

Like with a daguerreotype, Óscar Muñoz’ version also requires us to manipulate the reflective surface to view the image, and in doing so we see ourselves superimposed on Cornelius’ portrait. But in Muñoz’ work, the portrait is never truly fixed; it is always changing, reacting to air and humidity, slowly decaying, a beautiful -and tragic- metaphor for life. The subject of Muñoz’ work is not Robert Cornelius himself, but rather that moment when the fleeting image of the camera obscura was fixed for the first time. Muñoz unfixes it and returns it to a state of flux, prone to decay, like life itself.
 
José Roca, Artistic director, Philagrafika 2010.
 

Oscar Muñoz’s work is represented in the collections of the Tate Modern, L.A. MOCA, the Miami Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and La Caixa in Barcelona, among others. Muñoz was part of the 2006 Venice Biennale, and had solo exhibitions in 2008 at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, the Herzliya Museum, Israel, the Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), London, UK, and the Museo Extremeño e iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain. An upcoming survey of his work will be shown at the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria in 2010.

To purchase this limited edition print please visit our online shop HERE.

Questions about the print? Please call 215-701-8057 or email rmott@philagrafika.org