ART-PRESENTATION: Oscar Murillo-Social Altitude
In 2012 Oscar Murillo was getting up at four every morning to do a cleaning job to support his work as an artist; in 2013 his paintings teeming with loose, scratchy, expressive marks, patches of pure color, and daily dust and grime from the studio, scrawled with words such as burrito, yuka and chorizo, started reaching six-figure sums. The following year they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, then in 2015, his black collaged canvases hang, like ominous flags, over the entrance of the Venice Biennale.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Aspen Art Museum Archive
Oscar Murillo in his solo exhibition “Social Altitude” presents a new body of work including large-scale paintings and a video. As a multisensory experience, the show is intended to mobilize visitors to actively engage with current cultural concerns, among them the social dynamics of globalization and the ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced and circulated in today’s world. Born in Colombia and based in various locations, Murillo is known for an inventive and itinerant practice that encompasses paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, actions, live events, collaborative projects, and videos. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. Murillo’s work conveys a nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalisation and its attendant state of flux. In recent years, Murillo has traveled extensively throughout the world to research and prepare exhibitions and other projects, making works both in the studio and in unexpected locations. As a result, airplanes, which are able to move more or less freely and without regard to borders, and the contemplative isolation afforded by these long journeys, have become an important site of production for the artist. As Murillo explains: “Constant transnational movement has become an integral facet of my practice. Flight becomes not just a means of travel but a sacred ‘other’ space, the aeroplane seat itself becoming a unique ‘studio’ at a remove, a non-place which is both physically confined and freed from being in any real geographical location. Within this space, during the proscribed periods of time each journey affords, I engage in notation, mark making, recording, layering gestural marks onto surfaces: sketchbooks, Japanese paper, printouts from Google Maps, landing cards. This practice becomes a process of experimentation, of accumulation, and, in a sense, of research”. Murillo’s “Manifestation” paintings, in particular, represent a marked evolution in the artist’s engagement with process, containing within them a history of his studio practice. The works build on the technique developed by the artist in his “Catalyst” series, which he began in 2011. The “Catalyst” works are created by saturating a skein of canvas with pigment, laying a second canvas on top and using a stick or broom handle to transfer marks from one to the other, in an explosively energetic, full-body mark-making process. In the “Manifestation” works, Murillo takes this a step further, repurposing fragments of earlier catalyst works, along with fields of the deeply saturated “ink-pad” canvases. As with many of Murillo’s works, different pieces are sewn together and painted onto to create a collaged effect, consciously juxtaposing the different energies of painted planes.
Info: Aspen Art Museum, 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, Duration: 23/11/19-17/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.aspenartmuseum.org
