artnexus #84

The Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, in Bogotá, presented a retrospective exhibition of works by Óscar Muñoz. Titled Protografías, the show surveys Muñoz’s oeuvre with an emphasis on its special relationship with photography. Curator José Roca says: “If the ontology of photography resides in settling once and for all a moving image, separating it from life, we can say that Muñoz’s work situates itself in the temporal space prior to (or following) the truly decisive moment in which the image is thus settled: in that proto-moment in which an image is about to become photographic. It is in that sense that Muñoz’s work is photographic.” * All good retrospectives offer the possibility of an encounter with what has been and are an artist’s central concerns, those that define the course of his or her work. What is underscored in this case are Muñoz’s special connections to photography as a process, and with draftsmanship not as a mere technique but as “something that is always in our life and our mind, always part of our idea of the structure of things,” * all of that in parallel to his unique use of the support on which an image is constructed. The other constant is the weight of memory, of lived experience, demonstrating that what interests the artist is “the instant and the processes that have to occur for an image to congeal, or not, in memory. To explore a reflection about the tension that happens in the construction of the image.” * His concern for the way in which images can consolidate a mode of memory does not imply a value judgment or a moral conclusion; rather, it proposes the possibility for the viewer to approach a variety of ways of looking and of temporalities, revealing, both in the image itself and in the resources used to build it, how time flows, how situations recur. 
IVONNE PINI

 * Quoted from the catalog Óscar Muñoz Protografías. Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, 2011. Ivonne Pini