Carlos Quijon Jr. on Maya Muñoz
It’s via the mundane and the intimate that Maya Muñoz’s artwork invitations enchantment. Her exhibition “Stills from a 12 months of Dwelling Dangerously” offered multiple hundred acrylic work on paper produced through the pandemic: silhouettes of landscapes, seashores, our bodies of water; portraits; and scenes of empty areas the place folks often collect.
In Happiness (all works 2021), we acquired a full view of an deserted tennis court docket; behind it’s a fenced-off space with a pale mural emblazoned with the phrase HAPPINESS. In two works titled Open Court docket, we noticed different empty tennis courts enclosed by fences, the angular construction of those obstacles complementing the traces on the court docket. These sharp geometries discover aid in timber within the background—all rendered in overlapping spontaneous strokes of acrylic that break the phantasm of flatness and unsettle the composure of the straight traces. The compositions are frank, every portray providing a clear horizon and a transparent vantage level. This straightforwardness attracts us in, asking us to dwell on these photos of locations that may be drawn from the artist’s reminiscence. Muñoz’s hand model, characterised by conspicuous marks, jarring stripped-away paint, and a graphic utility of coloration, underlines the sense of the subjective in works whose scale suggests they could have come from sketchbooks.
Within the portraits, Muñoz generally fleshes out the options and contours, although more often than not her topics remained spectral or blurred with motion. In The Pitmasters, for example, three males look towards the viewer, their faces unreadable, nearly melting, fading into the yellow wall behind them. However other than Portrait with Bandana, the place a person’s nostril and mouth are coated with a material masks, all of the faces confronted us with their unmasked nakedness. The pandemic spurred ambivalence towards the human countenance—without delay making us flinch on the sight of the face and inducing a eager for a face-to-face encounters. And as for what’s behind the face, the collection “Skulls for Glad” returned many times to the time-honored vanitas motif.
Muñoz renders mundanity alluring. However this enchantingness takes form in an distinctive time—the empty courts would often be brimming with folks; the sight of different folks’s faces is often taken without any consideration. The present on this sense catalogued the unusual scenario we’ve all been residing via. Vax confirmed an unmanned desk—apparently arrange for administering vaccinations—on prime of that are what may very well be an icebox for vaccine ampoules; a brown bag, maybe for the disposal of used hypodermic needles; and a jar of hand sanitizer. The picture forgoes any too-literal therapy of its topic; even its palette is fanciful: The background is mint inexperienced, the desk an electrical coral. The “Skulls for Glad” works likewise draw energy from Muñoz’s ingenuous but idiosyncratic model. As an alternative of a somber melancholia, we discovered a extra informal figuration, with every cranium portrayed in vibrant, nearly acidic colours. By means of such selections, Muñoz’s intimate renderings deliver fascination again to a world dulled by a pandemic.
— Carlos Quijon Jr.
