Art

The myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection already overflows through the history of art. Colombian Oscar Muñoz updates the apocryphal tale by draining a charcoal droplet portrait down the plughole. In another looped film, the artist’s face shimmers in a puddle of water in his hand, before slipping through his fingers. And like that, he’s gone.

The nature of portraiture is made to seem fleetingly temporal and unable to divulge age, character, likeness or any other traits. Instead, Muñoz compares the collective human condition to the mechanical means of photography and film that he uses. In another projection, the faces he paints with water on to a hot pavement vanish within seconds, like the camera flash burning into photographic paper. His watery portraits (copied from newspaper obituaries) evaporate fast, leaving only a chin smudge or blotted eye, nodding to the desaparecidos of his country, those who are missing presumed dead.

If ‘Project for a Memorial’ sounds powerful, then a more memorable piece called ‘Breath’ upstairs will leave you, quite literally, winded. Shiny steel plates require a blow of hot air to reveal their grim mugshots (applied to the surface with invisible grease), soon fading and de-misting to leave just a mirror image. There are also newspaper covers recreated with painful stabs of hot needles in place of inked words and pictures. If all this sounds typically melodramatic and Latin American, then you’re too much of a cynic to appreciate Muñoz as an astute political activist, whose only media are memory and touch.