Oscar Muñoz (Popayán, Colombia, 1951) works with photography, video, drawing, printmaking, and painting, examining the relationships among image, memory, and identity. In the three videos shown here, the artist uses unstable elements, such as water and the body, to materialize and dissolve moving images. Portraits appear and disappear in them, establishing a persistent tension between permanence and ephemerality.
In Narciso [Narcissus] (2001–02), his first video work, Muñoz composes a self-portrait using charcoal dust on the surface of water in a sink—a procedure that recalls engraving and the chemical baths used in photographic development. As the water runs down the drain, the face and its shadow cast on the sink come closer and merge into a blot. As in the Greek myth of Narcissus—in which the hero falls in love with his reflection and tries unsuccessfully to capture it—the video highlights the impossibility of stabilizing identity in time.
In Línea del destino [Line of Destiny] (2006), Muñoz watches the reflection of his face in water held in the palm of his hand. Unlike a fixed portrait, the image deforms as the hand tries to contain the liquid, which runs between the lines of the fingers. The artist’s body fails to retain its own depiction, which reveals a fluid portrait destined for erasure.
A similar dynamic informs Re/trato [Portrait/Try Again], (2004), but as a resistance to collective forgetting. The artist paints faces successively with a brush and water on a concrete surface exposed to the sun. Before the drawing is completed, the heat evaporates the brushstrokes, and the process repeats itself continuously. The title is a pun and relates the portrait (retrato, in Spanish) to the effort to “re-trato” (try again) and evokes the forced disappearance of people in Colombia’s recent history.

Video Room: Oscar Muñoz is curated by Matheus de Andrade, Curatorial Assistant, MASP.

The exhibition is part of the year devoted to Latin American Histories, which includes monographic shows by Carolina Caycedo, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Coletivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), Damián Ortega, Jesús Soto, La Chola Poblete, Manuel Herreros and Mateo Manaure Arilla, Pablo Delano, Rosa Elena Curruchich, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Santiago Yahuarcani, and Sol Calero, in addition to the group show Latin American Histories and exhibitions in the Video Room by Clara Ianni, Claudia Martínez Garay, Edgar Calel, and Regina José Galindo.