It’s tempting to dismiss Oscar Murillo, the darling of speculators who buy and sell his harmless, bland canvases of stitched fabric (overlaid with desultory Expressionistic gestures, often words or numerals) for ridiculous sums of money. The London artist’s New York solo debut, a space-filling installation of a working assembly line covering marshmallows in chocolate, practically begs for snark about an art of empty calories, soft, fluffy goo coated in the thinnest of toothsome veneers. But the air of earnestness hanging over the proceedings makes such an attitude feel misplaced.
Murillo insists that giving away the chocolates to visitors constitutes a crucial aspect of his work (although Minimalist stacks of bins filled with the sweets are available at 50 grand a pop), aligning it squarely with Relational Aesthetics, the 1990s genre of social interactions as art. More precisely, his installation rehashes Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1992 act of serving Thai curry at 303 Gallery, a radical gesture at the time, but one criticized in part for playing up the artist’s exotic ethnicity for a largely white audience.
In turn, Murillo reproduces a candy factory from his native Colombia, the Colombina company plant at which his parents once worked. Recapitulating a forebear’s breakthrough is a student move—Murillo earned his M.F.A. two years ago—and here it is writ large with the budget of one of New York’s biggest galleries. A shelf of boxes of Dom Perignon affixed with Murillo’s drawings does nothing to alleviate the sense of being at a party to which few of us would actually be invited.—Joseph R. Wolin