“What does an artist do?”, asks Anselm Kiefer. “He makes connections”, he says. “He weaves invisible threads between things. He delves into history, whether it’s the history of humanity, the geological history of the Earth, or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos”.
Isabel Muñoz’s work is a slow-burning process, unfolding in time as it is conceived. It is a kind of arborescence that never stops rising, spreading, and growing imperceptibly, probably because it is a work that is not concerned with the passage of time, but with original time.
For almost thirty years, Isabel Muñoz has ventured to the edge of the world, to its most unreachable frontiers and into its deepest strata, until she reached the place of her origin, a place where ancestral civilizations continue to perpetuate their rites and traditions, those of a time that no longer exists. Japan, Congo, Iran, Bolivia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, etc.
Isabel Muñoz brings these shadows to the surface of the visible, and with them the mineral essence of a world on the verge of extinction. Through the photographic image, she links ancient times to our contemporary times, weaving these units together and readjusting their frequencies, ensuring the survival of one in the other. The photographic image is then the knot, the point of suture, the reprise that unites these two temporalities.
“In certain glances – through certain glances – the creation of the object is repeated: it becomes again”, writes Peter Handke in Yesterday on the Road (2005). The whole of Isabel Muñoz’s work lies in the advent of this “becoming again” that rises to the surface of her images, and you don’t have to believe in the power of magic to see the enigma of the world appearing there, intact.
This exhibition, whose title OMEGA refers to the link between human time and universal time, between finitude and infinity, offers a cross-section of the sedimentation of Isabel Muñoz’s work. While each of the images that make it up stands like a sacred monolith, crystallizing its evocative power, there is another type of image that is destined to remain in the shadow of the sacred.
These thousands of small instant images that trace constellations also replay the image in the making. They foresee it, precede it and hold their breath to prepare it to come. Not only are these snapshots anchored in the image and partly constitute it, but Isabel Muñoz’s practice can be likened to a writer’s note-taking, like the annotations in the margins of his text. It is this doubling of time that allows us to glimpse the full depth of Isabel Muñoz’s universe, to access the origin of her work, the place where Omega meets Alpha and heralds a new beginning.
Anne Morin