Audioguide "Juan Muñoz"

The silhouettes of two sentinels are arranged like figures from a shadow theater on an optical floor. One of them is in an attitude of rest, with his hands on one end of his weapon. The other on the move, with the shotgun resting on one of his shoulders. The articulated mechanical structure that supports them keeps them immobile, attached to the pillars. Its quiet seriousness contrasts with the perspective pattern of the pavement, a modular surface that creates an optical illusion and gives the scene a sense of urgency, of emotional anxiety.

Juan Muñoz used this optical floor resource for the first time in 1986, initiating a theatricalization process that would lead him to increase the scale of his pieces in relation to architecture. The works of Juan Muñoz have the quality of a story: one of the artist's favorite books was The desert of the tartars (1940) by Dino Buzzati, which tells the story of a border post whose sentinels guard against a forgotten threat, an existential parable in which the only thing that gives meaning to the existence of the border is surveillance itself.

The concept of the “threshold” is very present both in the artistic practice and in the writings of Juan Muñoz. He himself defines it as "that interstitial space" that is generated in those places that are not completely closed, that act as transit spaces. Here the border is marked by a series of columns twisted in a spiral movement, which destabilizes the balance of the pillared architecture of the Alcalá 31 room. Before them, a dwarf gazes at the horizon, self-absorbed. His position could seem watchful, witnessing precisely the crossing of the threshold, but at the same time he ignores the viewer.

The figure of the dwarf is an emotional otherness. Juan Muñoz explained several times the anecdote of the encounter with a dwarf at a traffic light, waiting to cross, and the irrepressible feeling of feeling guilty... as if the condition of the other was the consequence of his fault. Despite this confrontation, if in the history of art his position was relegated to the comic parody of the court jester, the artist places the dwarf in an existential condition, with great introspective depth.

The artist explained: “The work remains there, separated from you, as in a world of its own. I believe that in the most accomplished works of art, the pieces exist without you. I've always had the feeling that a piece should work even when no one is there (...). I would like to introduce a murmur into one of my sculptures, which will activatea only at night, when everyone was gone. Having it running all night and when the door was opened the room stopped murmuring”.

Juan Muñoz began making balconies, in different versions, in the mid-eighties. From those moments until the end of his career, the motif of the balcony represented a fundamental aspect in his work, parallel to the minaret or the watchtower. The balconies are especially relevant from a moment in which the artist turns the architectural space inside out: the railing is an exterior element that he inserts into the interior wall of the exhibition hall, like a dismembered fragment of a useless façade architecture. by not giving access to the vain that normally accompanies it.

The balcony, in Juan Muñoz, is a psychological sign of a double fault. On the one hand, the viewer looks up waiting for someone to access the viewpoint. On the other hand, by prolonging the useless wait, he loses his own sense of voyeur... because there will be no one to observe him and recognize his presence. The entire space of the exhibition hall becomes a strange threshold between a dramatized interior and a contradictory exterior where the spectators submit to their condition of participants, to the psychological condition of being part of what is exhibited... and of being ignored for it. .

These watchmen are part of a family of works that Juan Muñoz began to produce in 1992, the Conversation Pieces [conversation works], made up of groups of characters linked by social interaction. Each figure is like a grouch: its head, its torso, and its arms protrude from a sack that keeps them fixed in an unresolved situation.

This pair of vigilantes has something of the border, like the sentinels at the entrance or the two commemorative fires, but here it is built from the expectation of an emotional response between looking and being aware of being watched.

Two men sit in chairs against the wall, in suits of what looks like thick corduroy, a monochrome gray like his skin. One of them is wearing precariously balanced shoes that seem about to come loose. His hands are schematic, like rag dolls, and contrast with their more realistic faces. As in several of the artist's works, these two figures have the facial features of his brother Vicente.

The two figures seem to laugh outrageously, an emotional explosion foreign to the realm of art spaces. His silence is as uncomfortable as a noise, but it also disturbs the distance of remaining oblivious to the reason for his laughter. In this regard, the artist commented: “The interesting thing about theater is that you cannot respond. And then the curtain closes and you leave. A work must have that capacity, that you cannot respond to it”.

The blotter figures They were the last evolution of Juan Muñoz's characters. Presented in 1999 at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, they combine humanoids completely covered by a pleated gray surface, with the appearance of ruffled felt, performing simple actions and sometimes accompanied by a closed blind with which they share color and folded surface. The indifferent introspection was psychological in the previous characters, here it becomes the skin of his sculpture, eliminating all traces of realistic figuration, in a journey once again beyond the automaton or the doll that the sculptor had left behind a decade before.

Juan Muñoz was very interested in the antagonistic concepts of theatricality and absorption, posed as a critical reading of the consequences of art. minimal in contemporary sculpture by American theorist Michael Fried. The absorption would correspond to the autonomy of the work of art, independent –absorbed– of its context, and theatricality to an art that embraces the physical and social space in which it is installed. These pieces seem capable of ironically condensing both extremes: the figures deprived of humanity – hands, feet and face and covered in the same materiality as the backgrounds on which they are cut out – dramatize the absorption of the statue itself.