ART CITIES:Rio de Janeiro-Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz stands out as one of the most innovative and creative artists of the 21st century. Known for creating what he describes as photographic illusions, Muniz works with a wide range of unconventional materials – including sugar, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust etc. to meticulously create images before registering them with his camera.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galeria Nara Roesler Archive
In “Handmade”, Vik Muniz brings together unpublished works in which the artist renews paths and procedures present in its production, when investigating the tenuous frontier between reality and representation, between the original object and its copy. In the exhibition, the viewer won’t see works created from familiar images, nor references to mundane materials, here, Muniz references the vast tradition of Abstract Art as he distills its basic formula creating unusual ways of meditating on the image and the object, the ambiguity of the senses and the importance of the illusion. Besides the paradoxical relation between image and object and the recurrent use of illusionist strategies, “Illusion is a fundamental requirement of all kinds of language”, he says. Without narrative recourse, works explicitly reveal the work process, while playing with the certainties of the viewer. According to the artist, what you expect to be a photo is not, and what you expect to be an object is a photographic image. “In an age when everything is reproducible, the difference between the work and the image of the work almost does not exist,” he says. During the research leading up to his “Vik Muniz: Everything So Far: Catalogue Raisonné 1987-2015”, the artist realized how he’d relinquished a recurring procedure from early on in his career, when he wasn’t as involved in photography, the manipulation of the photographic surface after the capturing of the image. He then proceeded to re-embrace those strategies, redoing and adding to the photographs.
Info: Galeria Nara Roesler, Rua Redentor 241, Ipanema, Rio De Janeiro, Duration 1/12/17-7/2/18, Days & Hourss: Mon-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, https://nararoesler.art
