Xippas Gallery
Rue des Sablons 6 & Rue des Bains 61, 1205, Geneva, Switzerland


Xippas Geneva is pleased to present Handmade, a solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz.

The “handmade” works, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are the result of a hybrid process combining manual, or artisanal treatment – namely painting or collage – and high-resolution digital photography. The results are complex compositions, combining different techniques, making each work unique. Paper and cardboard are painted, cut out and superimposed on a surface, before being photographed in order to allow for manipulation, rearranging and further photographing, and so on. By creating different planes which reveal underlying elements and their photographs, Vik Muniz invents real trompe-l’œil where the objects and their photographic representations are interlinked in a visual game.

Inviting the spectator on a quest to distinguish between the object and its image, the artist pursues his research on the mechanisms of perception, a common thread throughout his work. Unlike the previous series, where images from the history of art or from collective memory were interpreted with unusual, but also daily, materials, Handmade attests to the recourse to artistic materials such as paper, cardboard or metal. Hence, this series refers to the fundamental principles of abstract art: color, form, and rhythm are used as the main components of the composition.

The works in this series, akin to geometric abstraction or Cubist paintings, play on volume and movement, transcending the two dimensions of the photographic image both symbolically and literally, in order to reconnect with its materiality. The artist, therefore, experiments with photographic media to create compositions in three dimensions, where the layers of paint, shapes cut out in the metal, and the shadows duplicate each other and overlap, merging with their images. Like bas-reliefs, these volume works contain a simulation, hovering between “truth” and illusion, between reality and its double.

The material trace of the artistic gesture which is therefore present in each piece alludes to the creation process without revealing it. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly mysterious as the eye loses itself, compelled to travel over the different planes of the image.

The construction of the image thereby invites the viewer to deconstruct it by the gaze. In this new series, Vik Muniz explores the nature of perception, playing on the dichotomy between the object and its representation, and reinventing the possibilities of the construction of the photographic image. The increasingly porous border between the object and its copy reveals the mechanism behind our ways of seeing and understanding the image. In the digital age, where images increasingly take the place of objects and their manipulation becomes an integral part of daily life, reproducibility becomes one of the legitimate principles of creation. As the artist says, “there is now hardly any difference between a piece of work and its image”. In his new series, he develops a reflection on the fleeting concept of material reality and its possible interpretations. The aim of the illusion created by Vik Muniz is therefore not simply to destabilize our perception, but to “reveal the architecture of our concept of truth”- 1

1 – Vik Muniz, Natura Pictrix. Interviews and Essays on Photography, Edgewise, New York – Paris – Turin, 2003, p. 47


Visit Xippas Gallery website here.

Xippas Gallery is pleased to present Handmade, Vik Muniz’s new solo exhibition. In this new series, Vik Muniz explores the nature of perception, playing on the dichotomy between the object and its representation, and reinventing the possibilities of the construction of the photographic image.

The “handmade” works, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are the result of a hybrid process combining manual, or artisanal treatment – namely painting or collage – and high-resolution digital photography. The results are complex compositions, each unique pieces, combining different techniques: paper and cardboard are painted, cut out and superimposed on a surface, before being photographed in order to allow for manipulation, rearranging and further photographing, and so on.

By creating different planes which reveal underlying elements and their photographs, Vik Muniz invents real trompe-l’œil where the objects and their photographic representations are interlinked in a visual game.

The works in this series, akin to geometric abstraction or Cubist paintings, play on volume and movement, transcending the two dimensions of the photographic image both symbolically and literally, in order to reconnect with its materiality. The artist, therefore, experiments with photographic media and uses the technique of printing on aluminum to create compositions in three dimensions, where the layers of paint, shapes cut out in the metal, and the shadows duplicate each other and overlap, merging with their images. Like bas-reliefs, these volume works contain a simulation, hovering between “truth” and illusion, between reality and its double.

The increasingly porous border between the object and its copy reveals the mechanism behind our ways of seeing and understanding the image. In the digital age, where images increasingly take the place of objects and their manipulation becomes an integral part of daily life, reproducibility becomes one of the legitimate principles of creation. As the artist says, “there is now hardly any difference between a piece of work and its image”. In his new series, he develops a reflection on the fleeting concept of material reality and its possible interpretations. The aim of the illusion created by Vik Muniz is therefore not simply to destabilize our perception, but to “reveal the architecture of our concept of truth”.

Galerie Xippas Paris
108 Rue Vieille du Temple,
75003 Paris,
France

Epistemes


February 23 – April 1, 2017
Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011


Opening Reception: Thursday, February 23, 6-8PM

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Epistemes, a solo show of new work by Vik Muniz. The exhibition – which premieres the artist’s new series Handmade in the United States – will be on view at the gallery from February 23 through April 1, 2017.

Best known for his re-creations of iconic images from visual culture made using nontraditional materials and recorded with a camera, Muniz here strips the work of representational imagery, in a direct exploration of the illusionist strategies and material processes that he has developed over the course of his career. As Muniz explains, “It’s like a menu of the ideas that I’ve drawn on, a compendium of strategies exposed in a very simple way.”

These new works combine the material object and photographic trompe l’oeil into a unified abstract composition. Commenting on the confounding image-object relationship probed within these works, Muniz observes, “It always goes both ways. What you expect to be a photo isn’t, and what you expect to be an object is a photographic image.” Extending this idea more broadly, Muniz adds, “In a time when everything’s reproducible, the difference between the artwork and its image is all but nonexistent.”

While not referencing specific artistic antecedents in Handmade, Muniz’s vocabulary draws connections to abstract art movements including concrete art, constructivism, and op art.

The exhibition’s title is taken from the philosophical term épistème, which Michel Foucault introduced in his book The Order of Things and refers to the implicit structures that set the conditions for the production of scientific knowledge in a given time and place.

http://www.centrodeartecontemporaneo.gob.ec/

In Vik Muniz’s work, the transparent is evident in the vapors and stratifications that allow the crystallization of the reproduced image. The photographic hardening is a magical and ritual consistency; it can pass through the traditional process, but also is concretized through a recourse to fantastical and unusual materials for photography such as sugar and chocolate, iron wire and dust, pantone , gelatin, which can give clarity to lights and shadows that form the images that document an event or a historical moment. In Muniz’s work in Venice, the condensation of the light that substantiates the portraits of artists from Chuck Close, Mark Rothko, or essential maps related to world events such as the birth of Darwin or the explosion of the first atom bomb, is obtained by resorting to the hardened composition of colors taken from the infinite range of pantone, or from the manipulation, through the introduction of air, of a body of gelatin. The result is an unexpected and extraordinary photographic consistency, almost a ritual of technical and contemporary magic. Since 1987,Muniz has tried to bring objects and images into coexistence, simulating a symbiosis that takes life from dynamism of shifting and passage between one thing and another. In “Tug of War,” 1988, stretching a rope through an imaginary space that divides the two bodies that pull at its end, he encourages a parallelism or an equivalency between reproduced image and material, which makes them continuous and at least complementary. It is a subtle play between direct and physical reconnaissance and photographic reconnaissance, which alludes to reality. Likewise in “Arrangements,” 1989, an arrangemen t of individual birds end up forming a flock. An attempt en route to a view of the word that joins together the existence of things, thereby confusing the glance and encouraging its reactive capacity. From 1988 to 1992 this deceptive mixture leads to the “Memory Rendering” series of historical images, codified in the memory, such as “Man Stopping Tank in Beijing,” where the basic role of the image is entrusted to an intersection between historical memory and personal memory, as if the construction of the memories were based on an extension of one’s own emotional charge, so that our entire universe of images might become a plastic experience. In fact it is from this reconstruction&Mac226; that the dissolution of the traditional photography emerges, in favor of continuity between image and material. First this is achieved through shaping cotton objects of everyday use, in “Individuals,” 1992-1993. Then in a series of clouds in ãEquivalentsä, 1993, he arrives at the illusion of the photographic design conducted with iron wire. Here, to all appearances, the surplus of technique cuts the legs of the reproductions, reduces them to fiction. Resorting to anomalous material, Muniz questions the process of seeing and perceiving. Calling upon the thing itself, the iron wire, then the chocolate, sugar, tomato, dust and scraps, he dissolves the distinction between the real and the apparent world. He carries out a hermeneutic operation, revealing that appearance is reality, just as reality is appearance. And so photographic language is an external aspect of the real world, but it is also its mnemonic essence and thus shows and materializes images, which in time become reality. Inverting photographic expression into a thing, Muniz reveals its hidden and deceptive nature: he causes its simulation to appear. In the affirmation that there is no longer anything that separates the simulacrum from the very components of reality, the artist points out to the histrionics of a language that now exists within the total unconsciousness of those who are looking. This is an iconoclastic position that disputes the legitimacy of images, in relation to worldly reality, except that Muniz&Mac226;s reality is an overturned iconoclasm; it recognizes that reality is an image and it is the material of its spectacularity. It is a hallucinating resemblance that is typical ofthe astonishing process of art.  Vik Muniz does not take photographs, he materializes them. As though they came from an unknown, impalpable limbo. As though his task were to bring them out into the light. His process is reversed, for he does not use light to photograph: he photographs the illumination that traverses his memory or his universe of objects and matter. This illumination is almost always an image that recalls another. Or one that recalls something that resembles something else. What matters is the informative aspect of the image, the possibility to make manifest a photograph that, be it a symbol or a figure, pays little attention to linguistic autonomy, but rather to its mimetic function. In giving solidity to figures, portraits, drawings or projections, made physical by a variety of materials, Muniz appears to deprive the documentary value of photography of its utility. He plays on itsloss of identity and on the ambiguity of its existence as testimony and illusion. He strips it of its functional and practical value and makes it live in a world that finds nourishment in a complex structure of social and representational symbols. He makes it the sum of all these subjects, which range from memories to journalistic reproduction, and to the history of art and that of photography. This is a typical stance among a generation of artists who trained in the late 1980s and totally abandoned the rigid, unequivocal approach of capturing and conveying reality on film as it appears before one&Mac226;s eyes. They have been increasingly interested in photography as a thing and an object that exists for formal, chromatic, material and optical metamorphoses and modifications. A shift into the performing dimension of photography, like a sculptural, visual magma that can be shaped at will. Removed from the documentation or registration of real events, and transformed into iridescent matter, whose body (the image) can be composed quite freely, almost as though it were created out of nothing. Creation through modeling, it takes the place of the shape impressed on film, almost as though it could live independently from its mechanical process. This dethronement of the traditional process of photography, which Muniz takes to its extreme consequences, is the end result of a historic process that, from Anselm Adams to Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank and through to Diane Arbus, concentrated on the experience of reality right through to the 1960s. It never let itself be diverted by off-camera processes and expression. Until then, it had followed the system of conventions in which what mattered was the take,the cut and the sequence. At times there was a foray into a narrative montage, into photomontage and into studies without the use of the camera. But photographers generally focused their attention on thematic and subjective reportages: they studied face or characters, social affairs or disasters, cities or the universe of culture. A frozen glimpse that revealed the sensitivity and understanding of a person observing the surrounding world, an intuition that became a snapshot of reality. So much so that it took its place in the media. In other words, a medium that was capable of influencing our perception of the world with its speed and its participatory force. As from 1968, however, with the advent of a conceptual approach to photography, it emerged from its primordial condition and established itself as a symbolic procedure. It then became necessary not to go out into the world, but to work on language. Creating self-referential pointers that, it is true, emerge from an image, but that can reach fruition in a project of alienation from their referent. There was a move to design the photograph, no longer capturing it by chance, but planning it according to a logic and inline with parameters that came before the finalresult. An a priori that once again linked thelanguage of photography to the investigations of the historical avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, in which the image was constructed and became an event in its own right, from Rodchenko to Man Ray, Moholy Nagy and El Lissitsky. A profound transformation that subtracted photography from its historical, familiar and recognisable condition and led it into a world of artistic abstraction. A place where all real contact with reality became unreal. It was transformed into a display of itself as though it were a mise en scène of its own process or a mise en scène of reality. From Ugo Mulas to Robert Mapplethorpe, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Serrano and Nan Goldin, the point of departure became the creation of an event. This might be the result of a process of conceptual treatment of the image or of its metaphysical fixation. Alternatively, it could become an extreme transformation into “scene,” in which the photographer became an actor or actress in a pseudo-event. What was real faded away and the image came to the fore. What was seen, even though on a stage, became reality. There was no longer any distinction between reality and simulation, almost as though the photograph had entered a narcissistic vortex in which only a reflection of itself had any significance. Another linguistic leap has been made since the 1980s, as photography has transformed itselfinto an object that can be created to favor its physical and material nature. As though it were a pure artistic medium in which the image self-generates artificially, without any function other than that of creating images ad infinitum like any ordinary design product. So, while the first study showed it to be a vehicle capable of permitting a certain experience of reality, later studies exalted the power of photography as a pure experience, unrelated to any reference framework other than self-definition or the actual photograph itself. This is where we come to a discussion about perception and illusion, about the perception and dilatation of sight, which must acquire awareness of its processes. As the terminal of a transmission no less than as the recipient of images. We are on a seesaw between real and unreal, where the imagination of the photographer can be transformed into the chromatic and molecular atomization we see in Chuck Close, in the pictorial hallucination of Joel Peter Witkin, in the mass technological dreams of Andreas Gursky. It can be seen as the fusion of a totally artificial and scenographic reality in Gregory Crewdson and in Thomas Demand, or as the theoretical paradigm of the mimesis of mimesis in Muniz’s photographs. Ever since 1987, partly in memory of the surreal cloning of Magritte, in which representation and reality blend into each other, the Brazilian artist has focused on the subject of reflected images, and indeed he started producing “things” such as the mixing of nails and thread in “Two Nails,” 1987, or the semi-deflated ball in painted bronze, “Ball,” 1991.Here, the duplicate of reality is a new image that, deceiving the eye, takes the place of the original. An exhilarating visual snare with the application of a formal and physical construction to create a counterfeit. It is an ironic game, if not irreverent, that talks of art as mimesis and illusion. An initial, declaration about the existence of an art of reflection as a vision of the world that becomes atheatrical phenomenon: a spectacular approach that belongs to the experience of Muniz, who has always been interested in theatrical mises en scène. Photography too is a stage, a pantomime of events and objects that blend together on its surface to create illusions and scenery, as in “Arrangements,” 1989, and in “Cogito Ergo Sum,” 1989, in which the exchange between object and photographic image is subjected to specular reversal: one is transferred into the other,and vice versa, to give both a broader existence. It is in this theatrical dilatation that innocent representation of the world becomes perverse. To such an extent that it can turn inside out. In “The Best of Life,” 1988-90, the artist photographs drawings he had drawn from memory. They are famous, historic pictures,like the South Vietnamese officer shooting a Vietcong soldier in the head, or the young Chinese man stopping the column of People’s Army tanks in Tienanmen Square: “Memory Rendering of Saigon Execution of Vietcong Suspect” and “Memory Rendering of Man Stopping Tank in Beijing.” The idea is to create a type of recollected reality with all its travesties and errors. A speculative regeneration of photographic images mediated by a system of values that is not the objective rendering of a camera, but rather theinterior vision of the individual. A candid eye that attempts to escape its unequivocal condition, almost as though it were attempting to free itself oftechnicalities and linguistic constraints to attain another reality of itself. This does not come from the new shot, but from the reflection of the photograph within the photograph, a form of wrong-footing that lives on the duplication not of reality, but of reality mediated and recorded by others. The horizon that opens up to Muniz from this sequence, which also includes “Memory Rendering of the Man on the Moon” and “Memory Rendering of John Lennon in Manhattan,” is the definition of a photograph that, through the artist, becomes the mimesis ofitself. It is potentially open to a pictorial and sculptural process in which the photographer is free to create any article that transcends both the real world and the reality of the photograph. This development appears to assert that photography has created a vacuum within itself, for it has attained the greatest possible reality. Indeed, in the 1980s, it took the entire crust of the earth in the Earth Catalogue and later went on to take the surfaces of all the other planets. In other words, everything possible. All that is left is the questioning of itself, to make it enigmatic and elusive of all the things that have appeared so far. It is no longer to be used as a service for a particular purpose, which might be the communication or documentation of reality, but rather for the very replacement of reality: its dissolution in image. An itinerary tied to the ferment of the principle of the double, the gravitational element of matter and the radiating fire of photography. Ever since 1987, an upward-thrusting force has designated the reality of Muniz’s works to the extent that the complexity of his vision is documented by the coexistence of object and image. Initially they were antagonists, even though complementary, in so far as they came together in a single narrative, like that of two figures pulling a rope: the interval between the two figures is measured precisely by that section of rope, in Tug of War, 1988. Photographic reality afoot: an object that led him to produce Individuals, from 1992 to 1993. This consisted in photographing amorphous shapes created by working a lump of putty. Each image emanates from the sculptural reorganization of the same fragment of material, so photographs are the assertion of one image that is created out of the destruction of another. Furthermore, the subject taken is absent, since it disappears each time to give life to the illusion of another subject. The result is something that catches perception on the wrong foot: an alien, self-contained representation that derives from photographic technique, but not from what is real. It systematically disappears from the sight of the artist. A detachment that makes the process indifferent. One that is not felt in terms of content but as purely illusory and distant technique. In 1993, this specular quality instantly led him to think of a historical dimension of this image, which appears out of nothing. In Equivalents the artist uses the modification of cotton-wool shapes to reintroduce the photographic experience of Anselm Adams&Mac226;s clouds. Now, however, the contemplation of nature has become artificial: here the development of the sculptural process that dominated in Individuals becomes photographic matter, with precise linguistic and historical references. A demythologization of the past that deprives photography of any residual knowledge and experience of the world, making it a practice once again, an exercise, a way of treating any subject and any situation. A free form of movement that is typical of art, and one that makes it possible to expand the thing itself and make it different from what it was before. This process of transformation makes photography performative: a creator of actions. This is an acceleration that makes it possible to reaffirm a tendency towards construction when all certainties have gone, as they have proved to be ephemeral, like the attempt to reinstate the old relationship of fealty between reality and imagination. Concerning the conjectured return to crude realism, between expressive and inexpressive, from Nan Goldin to Thomas Struth, Muniz&Mac226;s position is sceptical and disillusioned, if not ironic. Looking at the hyperrealist precedents of Chuck Close and Vija Celmins, he becomes aware of the impotence of all the crystallisations that purport to be new, so he sediments dejà vu while transforming it. The image to which he refers is pure simulation: a lack of reality, sense and belief. Since 1993, an awareness that his foundations werelacking has induced him to transform this weakness into expressive power. He has started moving towards a total reappraisal of visual illusion and snares. By means of a skilful, but not photographic shooting technique, and by using materials such as thread, nails, sugar, dust, chocolate and earth, he produced an imaginary world of figures and personalities,events and still lifes. These subjects aspire to replace the representation of reality without assumingits onerous value, and without the highly technical referents of photography. They are simply Pictures,images that signify nothing other than the technique’simperviousness to occupation for the purpose ofcreatingillusions and counterfeits. They mark the end of a devotional attitude towards the history of photography and of art, towards the knowledge of reality and its depiction. They are entities that are equivalent to others, but they do not bring with them the delusion of a new vision. They appear almost as a gesture of nihilism, almost as though tending towards the death of language, and yet they offer it in a new dimension. That of de-reality. A disastrous fall into matter, but one that only serves to define the territory of the image: one that must never conform down to the level of life but become an independent form in its own right. The Pictures are thus often followed by the material (dust, soil, chocolate, thread, wire, magazines, etcetera ) they open up a passageway through which the subjectivism and narcissism of taking photographs can pass, indifferent to the need for reportages. From 1993 to 2003, the Pictures established themselves as a debate on truth and falsehood, on the original and the effigy, on repetition and double. A clash between opposites that helped acquire awareness of an bscured reality that of linguistic concealment: the travestiment that photography is currently being subjected to by electronic manipulation. Muniz’s recognizable materials to make this clear. By using chocolate and pantone, sugar and magazine confetti, he talks of deception and defeat. He does this to document real struggles that are very often those involving people from the streets or artists, politicians, film stars and famous soccer players. By repeating the repeatable with unusual materials, he highlights the farce that accompanies the glorification of portraits by many contemporary artists. He unveils them and lays bare their ideological occultation, which talks solely of friends and acquaintances, while the real social context entails far more dramatic and tragic stratifications, like children working in the plantations on the island of St Kitts or surviving in the favelas in Brazil. The former are shown as ãthe sweetest group of human beings (Muniz), thanks to the sugar, while the latter are portrayed through the evidence of the streets,from cigarettes to bits of paper and other urban rejects: The Sugar Children, 1996, and Aftermath,1998. In these works, the artist strives to introduce a high degree of physical and social content, related to his manual skill and origins, so the harshness of the image or the softness of the outlines, or the consistency of the flesh can make contact with the velvety sweetness of the sugar. Or the rigidity and the compactness of the metal wire can relax as it creates light, ethereal patterns in Pictures of Wire, 1995 This is a phase in photography that, aware that it is simulation, is fascinated by the possibility of expanding its range of expression to involve materials other than the sensitive screen. With soft chocolate he depicts Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting or Joseph Beuys&Mac226; ritual action, or Warhol&Mac226;s double-portrait rendering of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, or Yves Klein’s leap into the void: the artist is indeed aware that heis putting all the images onto a stage. Especially those that are linked to the individual artists&Mac226; particular use of matter. As in their sculptures or paintings, almost always made of unusual materials and worked with arbitrary and subjective techniques, from dripping to silkscreen printing, or felt and gold, Muniz aims to give the word back to things, materials and rituals in photography too. Since in the end everything finishes up in the world of appearances, be they artistic or historical, the reality of the image only depends on something that displays itself. It is just that, compared with these big names of the 1960s, he does not think that the images conceal some witch-doctor or mechanic-type being, spiritual or irrational, but that, on the contrary, they are the pure appearance of themselves. This is why many of his works insist on the universe of art and on its way of being documented, not only at the moment of the performance, but also in the traces left in a single memory of macroscopic events such as Land Art. Muniz dedicates many “simulations” to this, from Spiral Jetty, After Smithson, 1997, all the way through to Pictures of Earthworks (The Sarzedo Series), 2002. He obtains these either by recreating the work visually, making use of modeling stratagems (which are almost always revealed by the presence of a toy truck, earthmover or cars) or by using childlike outlines ofimages such as a pair of glasses, a pair of scissors or a key: taken from above, as though from an airplane, they resemble ancient incisions made by theNazca culture in Peru or by Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer. In other cases, the pure appearance of minimal art, as presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is recreated, by contrast, using the dust and rubbish collected each day in the museum galleries, The Thing Themselves: Pictures of Dust, 2002. Here, with regard to the equilibrium between chocolate and Action Painting or procedural art, the highest degree of physical extraneity intermingles with the industrial and volumetric absolutes of Donald Judd and Richard Serra, of Robert Morris and Carl Andre: it dissolves it, with a definition of art as dust to dust, in a simulation that speaks of the essence of poly-matter as opposed to minimalist monolithism. In this sense, materiality helps overcome themetaphysical dimension, cubed in the minimalist reportage, to start discussing the quid pro quo that regulates representation by means of mechanical images. It attempts to place its ambiguity and deception between brackets: they are fundamentally linked to the mystery embedded within the content of the photograph. For this reason, his initial works approached the compositional structures that emerged from the manipulation of putty and cotton-wool, creating figures and still lifes, and at the same time going back over the tradition of making sculpture and then painting. Like Turner and Constable, he works on equivalents. They are nolonger chromatic, but concrete: he photographs portions of nature, be they artificial or natural, creating images of an object or of an abstract variant such as a cloud. Or, in the tradition of Conceptual Art, he invents pictures of newspaper articles made out of texts full of mistakes and photographs printed on newsprint. They are given to us as absurd information, pure semblance interweaving the real world with the world of subjectivity, Personal Articles: Small is Beautiful, 1996, followed in the same year by Displacements, pairs of blank squares in which the individual captions such as Sushimi Tempura Combination and Plate 268, Vincent Van Gogh. Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers. Arles, August 1888, 92.1×73 cm. National Gallery, London, provide the content that is missing, but that can easily be projected by the individual reader who, delving into his own memory, may find some content, however vague. An abstract and mental disquisition on photography that is bound up with a multiplicity of possible images that we are all able to project, against a single one that might be reproduced in the square. Muniz thus draws attention to a photograph or a reproduction that refers the viewer to a copy, not to reality. It absorbs all possible appearances into itself: any moment of the imagination experienced by others. At this point, it is worth repeating how, in Muniz’s work, the choice of matter is never extraneous to the subject but, on the contrary, participates in the photographic moment relived by the artist. The choice of wire and pantone are not extraneous to the universe of the subject being taken. The pantone surrounds the painting like colours and chromatic patterns in Chuck Close and Gerard Richter, like the impressionist atomization of Claude Monet and the monochromaticatomization in Yves Klein, while the wire that recreates Piranesi&Mac226;s famous prisons retraces the line of the artist&Mac226;s pencil, in Prisons, 2002. Elsewhere,nails recreate the perfect and absolute outlines of Rembrandt&Mac226;s self-portrait of 1630, in Beggars, 2001, and children&Mac226;s putty is used to create pornographic plots taken from adult magazines, Erotica, (Pictures of Silly Putty), 2001 and, lastly, he used candies in 2002 to create the great outdoor pictorial and photographic decoration for the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. All these works involve a profound transformation of photography, since by using materials like chocolate, nails, wire and sugar he terminates the distinction between the true world and the apparent world. These materials create a mediation that reveals the deceptive and dissembling action of the image. They make an object of representation in other words, they invert the factual conception of reality that considers what is real to be an object, and knowledge to be representation (Heidegger). They unfurl the language of photography and show it to be halfway between reality and appearance. They re-examine it in terms of a spectacularity that is able to reincarnate any subject, be it a portrait or a still life, a work of art or a newspaper article. In Clayton Days, 2000, Muniz&Mac226;s capacity for performance goes so far as to subvert the historical document. In his stay at the Frick Center in Pittsburgh, he used photography to recreate the 19thcentury ambience of Victorian life in the building. Hedid not give it a new look, but retrieved its former image by recreating rural scenes and games, human and social relationships. The result is hyperrealistic, for by using sepia-tinted pictures he manages to deceive history, recreating it in a personal perspective that undermines the evidence of the past, smothering it with his present, even though it is only acted out. He offers a photographic time that is outside history, but that is its continuation as though it really had existed. This work on the destiny of images may be the presence (as much as the imagination) of the past. An existence between ages that comes from a leveling out of the datability and contemporaneity of image and history. This can be seen in Pictures of Magazines, 2003, in which portraits are created by assembling confetti cut out from magazines and publications, with which Muniz forms the faces and facial details of famous or unknown personalities, from soccer ace Pelé to Lula, the president of Brazil,to the florist or his studio assistant in Brooklyn. In this case, matter is not other, like earth or wire, for it consists of fragments of printed pictures, and thus a choice of imaginary situations that doubles its value as a copy of a copy. It leads it into constant multiplication, the reproduction of a reproduction that establishes itself as the picture of a picture. A visionary, endless process in which the image loses all real dimension and turns into the subject of the image. It spirals in on itself, translating the informational data and printed photograph into the appearance of an appearance, that of a politician or a star into almost metaphysical icons. A perpetual oscillation between void and void, between apparition and apparition, for which Muniz seeks a moment of dialogue, that of a photographic image that exists for itself. A complete form that lives on the energy ofits materials and on the shapeless articulations that belong to the universe of the most elusive everyday life. What it really comes down to is that, like English landscape painters, he tends to give beauty to the incorporeal and immaterial element of a sensation or a feeling, or of a memory or a reproduction, by descending into a physical or psychological universe. It passes through the formal and material tradition of art; it is intimate and subjective, free and fragile, but it makes it possible to convey the image over the head of what is real, and even over photography. Here again reality is subjected to a metamorphosis and a disturbing process that intertwines opposites and, at the same time, designates the essence of thought and physical factuality. A sensual metaphysics.  © Germano Celant, July 2003