Artists

Oscar Muñoz

Press release

For his 4th solo exhibition at mor charpentier, Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz (b. 1951) continues his lifelong exploration of the fragile bond between image and memory. Across his practice, Muñoz investigates the notion of trace and the instability of representation, examining how images—like memories—persist, fade, and dissolve over time. Processes of projection, dusting, and printing do not simply depict disappearance; they enact it, transforming the act of looking into a negotiation between presence and erasure. Memory emerges less as a stable record than as a practice of attention, shaped as much by what slips away as by what remains.

In the main room, a first set of videos questions the possibility of capturing the moment. Hombre de arena projects, on a bed of sand, the Sisyphean gesture of a figure trying in vain to escape a wave, thus exploring the cyclical nature of effort and the impermanence of memory. In Proyecto para un memorial (Beltrán), photographic negatives are projected onto a fragile surface of paper and water, paying tribute to those who disappeared in southern Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s. Doomscroll extends this exploration into the digital realm, where fragments of text from newspapers, novels, and films appear and disappear on smartphone screens — the letters dissolving in water — suggesting how information saturation can become a mechanism of oblivion.

A second constellation turns to the home and intimate sphere, where memory is rehearsed through ordinary objects. In Monumento, white marble frames transform family portraits into hollow reliquaries, preserving the space of the image while acknowledging its absence. Another installation shows photographs filmed through reflective glass which allows ambient light and sound to infiltrate the image. In these videos—seemingly still images displayed on small screens within frames—portraits are completed with recorded conversations, murmurs, and sounds, folding private recollection into their surroundings. This process is further developed in Fundido a blanco, where subtle movements of

light and air animate the face of the artist's father drifting off to sleep, in a transitional state where absence and presence coexist.

Downstairs, Muñoz explores the printed, still image, treating the visual archive as both record and construct. Archivo por contacto reconstructs Cali's urban life from unsold photographs taken by fotocineros from the 1940s to the 1970s. Arranged chronologically, the images reveal architectural change, demographic shifts, and social hierarchies, enacting a dance between observer and observed that highlights the political weight of the image. Next to it, a small work shows two contact frames shot from opposite sides of a street, that capture a girl glancing backward, and a boy—the subject of her gaze—smiling at another photographer. Here, Muñoz stages the magic of the photographic instant through a microhistory where chance becomes structure.

Material fragility and the notion of archives are at the heart of the exhibition's final chapter, where Lo demás es historia unfolds in several forms: a series of four tables and a wall installation comprising several hundred silkscreen prints on paper. Created using charcoal powder and clay, collected and arranged by the artist, these images—which sometimes tend toward pure abstraction—are fragments oscillating between appearance and erasure, transforming the space into a living archive. Finally, Señales de vida presents 18 drawings made with fine dust, accompanied by a video based on Werner Herzog's first film, in which isolation and monotony drive a soldier mad. The work chooses to focus on a vast cloud of dust to evoke the absurdity of war and the conflicts that have marked Colombia.

Taken together, all the exhibited works treat visibility as a threshold rather than a promise. Muñoz doesn't illustrate loss; he stages the interval where appearance and disappearance meet. In that interval, memory persists as a mutable trace— demanding that we look carefully, accept uncertainty, and read the clues that history leaves behind.