拍品专文
‘My studio is a cradle of dust and dirt, of pollution. I don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which I’m the catalyst. Things get moved around, I step on them, and they get contaminated. It’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own’
(O. Murillo, quoted in L. Russell, ‘Oscar Murillo’, in BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine. org/article/6921/oscar-murillo [accessed 16 September 2015]).
Executed in 2012, Untitled is a visually-arresting, monumentally-scaled example of Oscar Murillo’s ‘stack’ paintings. Conceived as an installation, the work comprises two stretched canvases leant up against a wall, deliberately overlapping so that the underlying painting is partially obscured. Across the surface of the outermost work, Murillo crafts a cacophony of schismatic linear scribbles and scrawls, combined with thick, abrasive painterly gestures. In bright red paint, he daubs the word ‘Pollo’ across the canvas – a Spanish term that, as in many of his works, loosely evokes the artist’s Colombian heritage. With its upper and lower portions cast as mirror images of each other, the work exemplifies the artist’s technique of folding his canvases in half during painting. Before the mark-making process begins, each of Murillo’s paintings spends up to two months lying on the floor of his studio, left to gather dust, footprints and other pieces of so-called ‘DNA’. ‘My studio is a cradle of dust and dirt, of pollution’, he explains. ‘I don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which I’m the catalyst. Things get moved around, I step on them, and they get contaminated. It’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own’ (O. Murillo, quoted in L. Russell, ‘Oscar Murillo’, in BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine. org/article/6921/oscar-murillo [accessed 22nd December 2014]). Though evocative of a rich art-historical lineage, from Cy Twombly to Abstract Expressionism, works such as Untitled are ultimately the product of Murillo’s distinctly heuristic method, defined by the unpredictable matter and impulsive gestures that accrue upon the surface of his canvases over time.
(O. Murillo, quoted in L. Russell, ‘Oscar Murillo’, in BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine. org/article/6921/oscar-murillo [accessed 16 September 2015]).
Executed in 2012, Untitled is a visually-arresting, monumentally-scaled example of Oscar Murillo’s ‘stack’ paintings. Conceived as an installation, the work comprises two stretched canvases leant up against a wall, deliberately overlapping so that the underlying painting is partially obscured. Across the surface of the outermost work, Murillo crafts a cacophony of schismatic linear scribbles and scrawls, combined with thick, abrasive painterly gestures. In bright red paint, he daubs the word ‘Pollo’ across the canvas – a Spanish term that, as in many of his works, loosely evokes the artist’s Colombian heritage. With its upper and lower portions cast as mirror images of each other, the work exemplifies the artist’s technique of folding his canvases in half during painting. Before the mark-making process begins, each of Murillo’s paintings spends up to two months lying on the floor of his studio, left to gather dust, footprints and other pieces of so-called ‘DNA’. ‘My studio is a cradle of dust and dirt, of pollution’, he explains. ‘I don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which I’m the catalyst. Things get moved around, I step on them, and they get contaminated. It’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own’ (O. Murillo, quoted in L. Russell, ‘Oscar Murillo’, in BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine. org/article/6921/oscar-murillo [accessed 22nd December 2014]). Though evocative of a rich art-historical lineage, from Cy Twombly to Abstract Expressionism, works such as Untitled are ultimately the product of Murillo’s distinctly heuristic method, defined by the unpredictable matter and impulsive gestures that accrue upon the surface of his canvases over time.