The Line of Destiny by Óscar Muñoz

“In an era of increasing global political uncertainty and heightened states of anxiety, the works of Óscar Muñoz help to remind us how fragile we are.” Those were the words of Mark Sealy, chairman of the 2018 Hasselblad Prize jury, as he bestowed the award on the Popayán-born Colombian artist. The awarding of the prize came as a rather exceptional gesture. Technically speaking, Muñoz is not a photographer like the other laureates of this prestigious competition. His lineage is not that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, or Graciela Iturbide, however, his handling of the image penetrates with precision into a place where it has been necessary to recognize a unique ability.

We could say that the dramatic possibilities of light and shadow in relation to the definition of the image are a proper way to enter the work of Óscar Muñoz. However, perhaps the right way does not always allow us to enter into the mystery of a work that, realistically described, is more related to the instability of what we see. If the mission of a photographer is usually to obtain an image to seal the existence of an instant, in the case of Muñoz we are at the opposite end of the spectrum. His work pursues the process of formation and deformation of what we see and understand visually. And this can be quickly verified when walking through the gallery of the Minera Escondida Foundation.

In his projections displayed on the wall and on the floor, we see the appearance of faces that form and fall apart repeatedly on the surface of a container. The prominence acquired by the stain appears as a key to understanding that those faces that accompany us in the tour of the room are, like each one of us, a desire, a search, an illusion. Before our eyes, they reveal how a visual composition is produced from a stain that we associate with something known: based on the projective method of diagnosis inaugurated by the psychoanalyst Herman Rorschach, the stains would allow us to recognize certain symbols that determine our inner life. What we would distinguish there is, in reality, what our emotional memory projects, the ghosts that inhabit us. We are made of that which we see blurred, our emotions and fears haunt us in those black splashes that form like omens on the white of a washbasin.

What Óscar Muñoz makes clear to us is the veracity of the inexact, the power of suggestion that exists in the indefinite and, of course, reopens the discussion on the precariousness of the human, as shown by the immanence of his own face reflected on the water he accumulates in one hand. That impossible narcissism is just an act of recognition of what marks our line of destiny: condemned to appear and disappear as if it were a heartbeat, images are, at times, a backup that helps us find a memory of what we are looking for. “My work is focused on that crucial instant,” the artist himself pointed out in an interview, “where the document, the image, the impression or the trace can be consolidated or not; and that is why there are two possibilities: that of memory or that of oblivion”. By opening the blurred mystery that appears in the images that make up The Line of Destiny, photography is shown in a revelatory function from its visible inconstancy. This paradox of a photographer who, instead of fixing, delves into the essential inconstancy of what our eyes perceive, makes Muñoz an exceptional artist capable of “reminding us how fragile we are,” as Mark Sealy rightly pointed out. On the other hand, isn’t this fragility the deep breath of what is alive?