The first thing a visitor to Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid) finds is two cut-out dark figures, like a shadow theater, placed on a floor with geometric patterns that create an optical illusion. They are two sentinels, one with the weapon ready, the other has it on the ground. Juan Muñoz is proposing a story with them, a story to complete.
Leonora Carrington, the surrealism artist marked by a group rape of Carlists in Madrid
Further
The artist, as explained by the curator of the exhibition, Manuel Segade, in a guided tour on Tuesday, introduced fiction into his works, full of visual games, tricks, mirrors, double images and great theatricality.
Juan Muñoz was one of the most outstanding artists of his generation and, although he lived in Madrid, he did most of his work outside of Spain. He died in 2001, at the age of 48, from an aneurysm during a vacation in Ibiza. His last work was commissioned by London’s Tate Modern for its Turbine Hall: the impressive Double binda large installation that brings together all the issues that concerned the artist, who had already exhibited at Documenta in Kassel or at the Venice Biennale.
The Alcalá 31 exhibition is called All I see will outlive me, a quote from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova that Muñoz had written down in a post-it about a Scarface poster showing Al Pacino shooting, and that he was in his room in London while preparing the Tate exhibition. The show, which includes Muñoz’s production in the 1990s, is the first part of a larger project that continues with another exhibition at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles (Madrid) between June and November.
No limits between reality and fiction
“Juan Muñoz enters the history of international contemporary art because in the 80s he is one of the artists who most influences the dialogue between theater and representation. He ensures that there is no distance between what is expository and what is real in a space. The moment you enter an installation, everything around you has become a work of art. Juan worked in that place where viewers become protagonists of the work of art itself, where we have accepted to be part of the show”, explains Manuel Segade, director of CA2M. And he adds how, with this, Muñoz was a precursor of what happened from 2001 with contemporary culture, when the limits between fiction and reality began to blur, and he quotes the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, who does autofiction. “Juan was not only working on that, but he was also already announcing the fatality of confusing fiction with reality, what were the dangers of manipulation when fiction had encompassed everything,” says the curator.
On the way we pass one of the first dwarf figures that Muñoz made. In this case it is a woman, Sara, one of the few female figures in his career. Along with another dwarf, Jorge —whose sculpture is also in the exhibition— they worked with Muñoz in his studio in Madrid. Segade explains how non-normative bodies are in Muñoz’s work. “He used to say that when you meet a dwarf, for example, at a zebra crossing, you feel a strange feeling of guilt, of being to blame for someone being different from me. And that feeling of otherness is what he psychologically worked on throughout his works, ”says the curator. This adds another reason why Juan Muñoz has such an important weight in 20th century art: “What is repeated like a mantra throughout his entire biography is that he is one of the sculptors who at the end of the 20th century recovered figuration as something fundamental. He starts from a cold, conceptual and distant place but generates a hyper-emotional work that emotionally affects the viewer, which is why he can perhaps reach a large audience, unlike other artists”.
27 figures that talk to each other
In the central part of the room is one of Muñoz’s iconic pieces: Square, a set of 27 human figures, all male, with Chinese features, which seem to interact with each other, and in which the theatricality that runs through the artist’s work can be seen. Juan Muñoz made it expressly for the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid, where it was exhibited in 1996 as part of the first retrospective organized by the Museo Reina Sofía. It was bought by two German collectors, and had never returned to Spain. The figures are slightly smaller than the size of a person, something the artist did in all his human figures. The spectator cannot mix with them, only contemplate them in the distance, just as the author wanted.
Manuel Segade explains how the work challenges those who look at it: “The Chinese are all laughing at something, it seems that an anecdote has occurred that we don’t know about, it is a narrative from which we are absolutely excluded. What’s more, it even looks like the Chinese might be laughing at us. Originally, Juan had put another Chinese in the middle, which was the central anecdote. But when they were setting up the exhibition, he decided that it should not be there and that is what they did, they withdrew it and that is how it was exhibited. Creating that space of silence, of emptiness is what makes the piece masterful”, reflects the curator, who explains that all the heads are the same, the twenty-seven are based on a wrinkled 19th century head, found in an antiques dealer. , a head that Muñoz duplicates and changes in scale.
Empty balconies, figures that laugh out loud
Going upstairs, you have to cross two columns with two bronze fire sculptures, as if you were crossing a threshold, to come across a sculpture made up of two human figures, “Two seated on the wall”, following the chain of pairs or doubles that runs through Muñoz’s work. These two are sitting on two chairs on the edge of the wall, dangling, they look like they are about to fall off. They laugh out loud and, again, we are out of the story, we don’t know the reason for their laughter. “There is a realism, a hyperrealism even, in the faces. But then there is the distance from that gray color. Juan was color blind, by the way, and that is why there is little color in his pieces. With the resin technique that can be seen in various pieces, by soaking the fabrics with the resin he manages to solidify them, transform them into something else. And in the hands there is again the renunciation of a reliable representation, the hands are gloves full of resin that have solidified and become something like a doll, like a humanoid. That is part of that sinister distance, of that grimness that he wants to give, it seems that there is a closeness and suddenly, you see something that tells you no, this is not human and it is not like me. And that is part of a game with representation”, says Manuel Segade.
The first works of Juan Muñoz were installations with architectural elements such as balconies, handrails, floors or stairs, which appeared isolated and empty, like a kind of stage to which the actors seem to be about to arrive, some of whom can be seen at the exhibition. He later began to create human figures that at first were isolated characters like ventriloquists, with no one to give them a voice or theater prompters on an empty stage, with no one to talk to. In the 1990s, these sculptures began to be less static and to relate to each other, until reaching groups of human figures that together manage to create a space, a theatrical scene. are their Conversation pieceslike the work Square of the exhibition, with these standing figures carefully placed in groups that invite the viewer to interact with them. With them, Muñoz jokes about the lack of communication. They are figures that seem to converse with each other, to no avail. Silence, sound or absence are issues that have always interested Muñoz.
Silence, sound and isolation
In 1997 Juan Muñoz began to create figures that had to be installed hanging from the ceiling. One of them is suspended in the exhibition, With the rope in the mouth, with which the artist pays homage to the painting of Degas Miss La La, a 19th-century trapeze artist in Paris who had captivated audiences by rising from the ground holding her body to a ring with her mouth. Again, silence: if the figure speaks, she falls to her death. “Juan starts from some theories from the 80s that state that a work of art is not only talking to you about the subject it deals with, but that the way of seeing it and how you interpret it is the very subject of the work of art. Let’s say that here not only is a character hanging, but the ones who are hanging are us before the representation. That thing of leaving you suspended, which is something that is continuous in his work, like his ventriloquist dolls from the 80s, who are waiting for you to make them talk, but they are made of bronze and they will never speak”, explains the curator of The exhibition.
The exhibition in the Alcalá 31 room will have its second part at the 2 de Mayo Art Center in Móstoles starting on June 17, the day the artist would have turned 70. In that exhibition, called In the purple hour in reference to a poem by TS Eliot, the artist’s early stage works will be on display. “It is not that there is another Juan Muñoz but it will greatly enrich the vision of his work because there are those hesitations from the beginning, things that are not the language we are used to now. We will see an artist still partly to be done”, concludes Manuel Segade.