Guillermo Muñoz Vera

The figure in Vermeer’s painting is generally supposed to be the microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who was a contemporary of Vermeer in Delft, and the executor of the painter’s will. Leeuwenhoek also apparently posed for a painting that is a pair to this one, The Astrologer. Some art historians have hypothesized that Leeuwenhoek, who was also an expert in the use of lenses, helped Vermeer to make the camera obscura the artist is supposed to have used when composing his paintings.
If one puts this painting in the context suggested by the title of the whole series, Terra Australis, there are several possible layers of meaning. Terra Australis was the name given to a supposed vast new continent in the southern hemisphere. The idea that there was such a body of land was first put forward by Aristotle, and later elaborated by the Greek geographer Ptolemy, who lived in the 1st century c.e. The idea that there must be such a continent obsessed many of the leading scientists and adventurers of the Age of Discovery, which stretches from the last years of the 15th century until the middle of the 18th. Some mid 16th century maps actually show its existence as a fact. Juan Fernández, a Spanish explorer who sailed from Munoz Vera’s native Chile in 1576, actually claimed to have discovered it, and the story has resonated in Chilean imaginations ever since. In fact, it is just possible that Fernández made the first European sighting of New Zealand, long before Captain Cook.

The painting is therefore essentially a tribute to the power of the human imagination. The man in the foreground, gazing at some panorama we can’t see, is dreaming of things that don’t exist, but might exist, if he puts sufficient force of will into imagining them. If Vermeer’s subject is in fact Leeuwenhoek, this adds an interesting gloss to the situation. Leeuwenhoek is famous for his discovery of animalicules – living entities too small to be visible to the human eye. This discovery was made possible by the rapid improvement of lenses, during the period in which he lived. The invisible animalicules, metaphorically speaking, occupy a parallel universe to the one that is generally known. Another major painting, extremely ambitious because of the large number of figures it contains, is entitled Nuevo Mundo de Lope. If refers to a well-known play by the prolific Spanish Golden age writer Lope de Vega. The full title is El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón. An audience, all male,is shown watching a representation of the play, in some cases not very attentively. And here too there is the device of a picture within a picture. Hung against the walls of the courtyard are painted cloths, one with colorful representations of ‘Indians’. The cast list of the play, when one consults it, is a strange mixture. Those who appear include Columbus himself, the King and Queen of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Christian Religion and Idolatry (both personified), a Demon, and, sure enough, several aboriginal inhabitants of the new world that Columbus discovered. The play is now often discussed in conjunction with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as one of the earliest presentations of the idea of the Other – that is to say of beings viewed as being essentially excluded or alien. The idea was introduced into philosophy by Hegel. According to Hegel, an ‘I’ encounters another ‘I’ and finds that this compromises its own pre-eminence and control of the world it inhabits. The choice is either to ignore this Other, or to see it as a threat and enter into a struggle to subdue or enslave it. It is easy to see how this relates to the myth of a Terra Australis.

Other paintings in the series play in a wide variety different ways with the central ideas that have already been touched on here. Quite a number are extremely skillful still life compositions, which feature globes and related objects, such as astrolabes and orrerys. One still life, however, entitled La Arucania, features a Spanish conquistador’s morion and powder horn, contrasted with indigenous musical instruments, typical of a southern region of Chile that the Spaniards never completely conquered. The urge of conquer is paired ironically in the composition with the urge to create. Some canvases show sailing vessels at sea – historic sailing ships, not modern ones, emblematic of the adventures of early voyagers, setting out, like Juan Fernández already mentioned, into regions of the world then still completely unknown.

The paintings of the Terra Australis series are virtuoso performances, contributions to a tradition of realist art that continues to flourish both in Spain and in Latin America. Yet they are also something considerably more. The realism resonates because it is the vehicle for meditations on the condition of humankind, cast adrift in an increasingly uncertain world, yet always conscious that there may be something more, some entirely new realm, beyond the visible horizon. The paintings are Post Modern in the sense that they often make use of formulae borrowed directly from the Old Masters. This is particularly true of the still lifes, which make use of time-honored properties – a skull, an hour-glass, a pile of old books, with no modern inclusions. The compositions are often deliberately based on those used by the Netherlandish and Spanish still life painters of the first half of the 17th century – compare, for example, Muñoz Vera’s Vanitas with paintings on the same theme made by Jan Davidszoon de Heem (1606-1684). Yet there is always a note of skeptical irony that assures us that these are contemporary works, mirrors of our own restless, always dissatisfied sensibility. The elusive, forever receding great southern continent is, in the terms Muñoz Vera sets out for us, still to be discovered.

Born in 1933 in Kingston, Jamaica, Edward Lucie-Smith moved to Britain in 1946 and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. He is an internationally known art critic and historian who is also a published poet, an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has written more than sixty books about art.

Profile

Guillermo Muñoz Vera is one of the best-known New Realist painters in Spain and Latin America. He was born in 1956 in Concepción, Chile, and began his artistic studies at the University of Chile in Santiago in 1973. His talent was recognized early, and his first solo exhibition took place in Santiago in 1976, under the patronage of the Chilean Ministry of Education. In the following year he was appointed Adjoint Professor of Drawing in the University of Chile’s School of Fine Arts
In 1979, he left Santiago for Madrid, to further his artistic education. He decided to settle in Spain, and became a Spanish citizen in 1985. His first solo exhibition in Europe took place in 1986. Since then he has had numerous solo shows, and has participated in a large number of collective exhibitions and been shown in numerous important art fairs, mostly in Spain, Germany, Italy and the United States. The first monograph about his work was published in 1991, covering the work made during the previous decade.
In 1994 he and the painter Carmen Spinola founded the ARAUCO Talleres de Arte, an interdisciplinary cultural space, where painting was linked to printmaking, graphic design, the theatre and musical activities. As co-director, he was responsible for the teaching of both drawing and painting. In 1996, ARAUCO became the Fundación Arte y Autores Contemporáneos, of which he is now vice president. This not-for-profit Foundation organizes and promotes cultural activities of all kinds linked to the plastic arts, providing bursaries for young artists and organizing exhibitions, concerts and theatrical events. The artist’s first full retrospective exhibition took place in 2000 at the Madrid Cultural Center. Consisting of more than 140 works, it surveyed 27 years of uninterrupted artistic activity. In 2003 he gave two paintings to the presidential Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago. The gift commemorated the 30th anniversary of the death of President Salvador Allende, and the beginning of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. In 2004, Muñoz Vera began work on the project Chile Today, a commemoration of the Bicentenary of Chile’s Declaration of Independence. It consists of 180 square meters of paintings, which were installed in the Santiago metro station La Moneda in 2005. 14 murals reflect his vision of the landscape and people of Chile. In 2011, Muñoz Vera had an exhibition entitled Terra Australis Incognita at Forum Gallery, New York.