Vik Muniz
Xippas - Paris
To offer an overview of the work of the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz may be a complicated task due to the variety of formats and supports he resorts to, which may render any interpretative attempt rather complex, whether as a result of the iconographic richness of the work or of the dialogues with and influence of history. Since the mid-1990s, Muniz has earned international recognition based on the photographic works he creates with materials used in everyday life chocolate, sugar, metal thread, jelly, dust and diamonds. These images, for which he draws inspiration from present-day life, from art history or from famous personages, are at the same time familiar and enigmatic. They appear, at first glance, as spirited visual propositions and they question the way in which visual information is constructed and presented, and the way in which it is perceived by the spectator, who must also consider the relationship between the image and the material used to represent it and go beyond the immediate response to the subject itself.
The artist is familiar with the task of re-materializing famous images or pictures in order to photograph the result. Each of his series of reproductions resorts to a material he privileges: junk in the case of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (Pictures of Junk, 2005), peanut butter in the case of the Mona Lisa after Warhol’s (1999), or dirt (Pictures of Dust, 1999), diamonds (Pictures of Diamonds, 2004) and caviar (Caviar Monsters, 2004). Each of these materials provides substance to the respective painting in question, interfering with the intellectuallized gaze through which these works are usually viewed. The work is offered for contemplation for it to be admired. Vik Muniz challenges our way of seeing, and the familiar becomes an object of contem- plation subject to an entirely different set of rules and associa- tions. Neither the individuals nor the materials with which they are rendered are random. At first, Muniz’s works appear to be documents, essentially portraits or subjects that communicate something about people or places in a convincing, contemporary way, and in whose identity or meaning are primordial. In his fifth exhibition at Xippas Gallery (Paris), Muniz presented two series of photographs. A first series was inspired by emblematic paintings Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, Picasso’s Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he recomposes in the manner of a puzzle, arranging the pieces without making them fit together.
Several puzzles printed with the same image are used in the execution of the work, except that the pieces in each puzzle are cut differently. Vik Muniz displays the hundreds of pieces with out adjusting them, so as to redesign the contours of the image and thus render it recognizable. The second series, inspired by Brassaï, André Kertész, Robert Frank, Weegee or Andreas Feinninger’s clichés, revisit the cultural and emotional rela- tionship we have with black-and-white photography. These images are reproduced through the superposition of paper cuttings in nuances ranging from black –through different shades of gray to white. Whereas when viewed closely the result seems grotesque, from a certain distance the images are per- fectly identical to the original photographs by which they were inspired. In few seconds we identify the work, we notice the alteration that structures it and ordains it, but we immediately recognize the original. On examining them more closely, one discovers that these subjects are not what they seem; the pho- tograph has been manipulated with the aim of subverting their identity and reinforcing their meaning.
Through the process of creation of these images, Vik Muniz plays several roles. Cultivating a mischievous temperament pervaded with irony, he is at the same time a painter, a sculptor, a pho- tographer and a theoretician. Reinforcing our feeling of familiarity with objects, Muniz “trompe l’oeil”, he creates a deceptive appearance. While his works initially show a sensual and ambiguous image, they interrogate at the same time the process- es of visual perception. They encourage doubt and stimulate our ability to look at things and analyze them. Vision is a form of intelligence and identification is a comfort of sorts. Muniz’s images are comforting in their sense of familiarity, but above all, they allow us to supercede the process of identification.
