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Lot Essay
Executed in 1994, Juan Muñoz's Two Floors, Four Figures is a unique and highly distinctive work which presents the viewer with a mise en scène, a narrative sequence which perfectly demonstrates the artist's fascination with theatre while providing a poetic insight into his views on the human condition and its limitations. Executed in the same year as his major outdoor installation Conversation Piece (Dublin), the work immediately introduces two of the key aspects of his concepts in the title, floors and figures. On the upper floor of Two Floors, Four Figures, two figures seem to be arguing, with a third entering the room to intervene; meanwhile, downstairs, a solitary character wanders from one room to the other, eventually looking out of a window. Floors divide people and create unknown spaces. There is a hint of a sense of set design, of a Pirandello-like play being acted out in miniature before our eyes. This is a dysfunctional, disjointed doll's house, and as such taps into the rich vein of alienation that underlies Muñoz's works and lends his work its unique and enigmatic power.
The way that Muñoz has presented the figures themselves in this work reinforces his illustration of the problematic aspects of human experience. They are conspicuously and deliberately unformed, rendering them general and universal. Their rounded bodies, a recurring feature in Muñoz's sculptures, hint at an inability to move, a lack of control. To add to this, they are executed in a very heavy and silent medium, bronze which contrasts dramatically with the beautiful fragility of the parquetry floor. The sameness and facelessness introduces the concern with the inadequacy and impossibility of true communication that lies at the heart of Muñoz's oeuvre. This is heightened by the bareness of the walls, which reduce these rooms to a lowest common denominator, lending them the sense of being the homes of Everyman figures. By using a visual vocabulary that is paired back yet domestic, Muñoz subverts the familiar, the homely, in order to heighten the tension of this scene being played out in this sculptural vignette; he thus amplifies the atmosphere of confrontation on the upper floor and the solitary, melancholy contemplation on the lower. All the while there is silence all around.
The way that Muñoz has presented the figures themselves in this work reinforces his illustration of the problematic aspects of human experience. They are conspicuously and deliberately unformed, rendering them general and universal. Their rounded bodies, a recurring feature in Muñoz's sculptures, hint at an inability to move, a lack of control. To add to this, they are executed in a very heavy and silent medium, bronze which contrasts dramatically with the beautiful fragility of the parquetry floor. The sameness and facelessness introduces the concern with the inadequacy and impossibility of true communication that lies at the heart of Muñoz's oeuvre. This is heightened by the bareness of the walls, which reduce these rooms to a lowest common denominator, lending them the sense of being the homes of Everyman figures. By using a visual vocabulary that is paired back yet domestic, Muñoz subverts the familiar, the homely, in order to heighten the tension of this scene being played out in this sculptural vignette; he thus amplifies the atmosphere of confrontation on the upper floor and the solitary, melancholy contemplation on the lower. All the while there is silence all around.