SHORT FRICTIONS: NEW WORKS BY KIKO ESCORA AND MAYA MUNOZ
Curated by Siddharta Perez
October 15- November 6, 2011
Main Gallery
Kiko Escora and Maya Muñoz have much in common despite their stylistically diverging practices. They are both- in a sense- on the verge of being comfortably “autumnal”; possessed of a certain maturity that is less prone to overt “experimental phases”. Their subjects’ gestures are fulfilled and the artists’ sense of identification with them distinct and charged. However, what becomes of their sitters if Escora and Muñoz make them casualties to their process in order to assert a painterly honesty?
Short Frictions is precisely this. Like intervisible lines or the point of mutually visible lines of one from the other, Escora and Muñoz come together this one time in an abrupt shift of gear in imagery and format to produce a peculiar blend of remoteness and intimacy. While the artists still situate portraits in these new works, these representations become undone and almost atmospheric. Painterly devices such as the grid, the aleatory qualities of the medium and other physical frictions govern the making of Short Frictions. The heavy and defined brushstroke is no longer an index of earnestness for Escora and Muñoz. Instead, they turn to the pursuit of chance manipulated through practice.
Short Frictions thus poses questions about what painters have made of portraiture after so many portraits. It makes us look at the practice of painting, from the elemental, subconscious gestures of painters, through to the site of subjective origin that leads to narrative and, emotional charge.
