Description:

If I have to find one "constant" that runs through all of Marco's work, it would be his obsession with things that move at the same time they are still, with the gaps, gulfs, and universes contained between movement and stillness, i.e., paper bags, sidewalks, faces squeezed and distorted by canvasses that barely contain them; bicycles shown not just as objects, but as the energy, the life force released by the object as it is impacted on both by the eye of the artist, and the vagaries of the weather. Marco takes from the North Eastern industrial landscape, from the steel age, and gives visual proof to the maxim from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" that, "exuberance is beauty." Marco's eye is not that of a camera documenting, but of a camera responding, participating in the life and energy of the shapes and forms it depicts. His photos of plastic sheeting and telephone poles are taken to release the mystery of things we take for granted everyday. In this sense, his work has the spiritual dimension of both prophecy and witness. Most importantly, Munoz is passionately involved not in "ideas" but in the spontaneous flow of imagery, structure, thought. As Braque said, "The picture must win over the idea of the picture, or both die." The present age may be cynical about exuberance and enthusiasm. We try so hard never to "go too far," even as our world becomes more violent and insane. We play it safe, save in commercially or politically manipulated fits of hysteria. A sort of hip, self-conscious, brooding mediocrity seems to be the norm. Things are leveled to the point where everything and nothing has "meaning," where concept overrides the value of the eye. The paintings, photos, sculptures, drawings, and pottery of Marco Munoz are antithetical to this state of affairs. They defy all that is trendy, cool, and faddish in contemporary art. By reaffirming a love for and skill in depicting form in all its shape-shifting glory, Munoz has reaffirmed enthusiasm for that which is "seen," rather than merely "conceived." He has restored the visual to its prospects and provinces of joy.