Interior is a lithograph tied to Interiores blancos, a series of drawings in charcoal on paper. Óscar Muñoz began working on the piece in the early eighties, after his celebrated Inquilinatos. Interiores blancos submerges itself into the intimacy of bathrooms, which seem to belong inside his tenement houses. In these interiors Muñoz delves into the effects of the dematerialization caused by the intensity of light on matter, like that produced by a camera flash—a constant reference in his work. Or, perhaps, like that of the reverberation of the sun that erases things during the midday hours in Cali. “There’s a time of the day in Cali in which people seem to be falling apart,” the artist said at one time. What is important in this work is the feeling of suspense between being and not being. The fact that Interior is a lithograph refers to another one of Muñoz’s facets, that of the graphic artist. His experience in this field goes back to the seventies, when he became part of the collective Taller Gráfico Experimental de Cali y Corporación Prográfica, along with Ever Astudillo, María de la Paz Jaramillo, Phanor León, and Pedro Alcántara. That is what triggered Pedro Alcántara’s interest in creating Graficario de la lucha popular de Colombia (1977), a portfolio of works for which Muñoz made a lithograph related to his Inquilinato series. That marks the beginning of the artist’s exploration of lithography, which has generally been a latent aspect in his drawings.
Óscar Muñoz, born in Popayán, is an active Colombian artist currently living in Cali. In 1971 he graduated from the Escuela de Bellas Artes in that city and held his first exhibition, Dibujos morbosos, at the independent gallery Ciudad Solar. However, his first breakthrough took place years later with his series Inquilinatos, a collection of large-scale black and white drawings—a chromatic choice resulting from his color blindness—that depicts, in a photorealistic manner, the interiors of low-income buildings wrapped in an oppressive gloom, where figures prowl lost in thought while awaiting something. In the eighties, the dark backdrops of the Inquilinatos gave way to an intense white that seems to be burning the images, placing his work between being and not being. This led to series such as Interiores blancos (1981- 1986), Levantamientos y superficies (1981-1993), Tiznados (1990-1991), Fundido a blanco (2010), and Impresiones débiles (2010-2011). In the mid-eighties, the artist began to develop images that ranged between materialization and dematerialization, images capable of representing, based on their own materiality, the frailty and the persistence of things, such as that of memory, identity, and life. He then started a research process that led him to abandon traditional mediums—starting with Cortinas de baño (1985-1986)—and introduce elements such as water (Simulacros, 1999, Re/trato, 2004, Línea de destino, 2006), air (Aliento, 1995), fire (the pyrography on newspaper in Paístiempo, 2007-2011), and the passage of time. Clean, poetic, and coherent, the now well-known work of Muñoz moves effortlessly between drawing, photography, installation, and video art, as he examines the relationship between human beings, their memory, and their evolution.
