Juan Muñoz. Alicia Chillida

Juan Muñoz's sculptures, drawings and installations do not describe actions, characters or places, they are rather states of being: looks, waits, listens, observations... A room, a figure or a drawing by Muñoz seem to be oscillating between two states (between something visible and knowable and something invisible and unknown). The sculptures and spaces that this artist creates articulate a dialectic between the exterior and the interior, between the social and the existential. His figures assume a double status, they are public sculptures with private thoughts.

Muñoz's work represents a significant and very specific reorientation of figurative art in the late twentieth century. In one sense it is possible to inscribe the artist's achievements within the figurative tradition associated with funerary sculpture and the public statues of Degàs or Giacometti. However, these sculptures have something of a brief interchange with the work of Beckett, Harold Pinter, film noir techniques or baroque architecture. The emphasis is not only on the figures, but on the space between them; not only on the things people say or do, but on the pauses, the silences... With these sculptural tableaux of stillness and suspense, Muñoz dramatizes the space itself.

After having collaborated in London (1992) and Dublin (1994), Juan Muñoz and James Lingwood work together for the third time in this exhibition. The exhibition space of the Palacio de Velázquez has a dual character: it is an interior space that appears to be an exterior space, an interior landscape waiting for its emptiness to be animated.

Some of the coordinates of the project are determined. A large part of the central space of the Palace is visible to the public, but inaccessible. The figures are arranged in the central naves, some solitary, others seated, but all of them silent and immobile... It is possible to observe a general panoramic view of this empty inhabited landscape from certain points of the building, accessing the staircase to the balcony. The vision itself becomes a subject of opening and closing.

Despite including earlier works, this exhibition is not retrospective in nature. In order to satisfy the desire for an extensive look at the work of this artist, an exhaustive review over time is carried out through a selection of some 80 drawings, which function as a memory bank of the ideas and recurring strokes in his work. The drawings are presented in a sort of avenue with independent showcase-boxes.

The configuration of the exhibition spaces is carried out through the selection of different works: the dwarf, the prompter, the empty balcony, the figure that sighs to itself, or the silent drums... The author works with highly sophisticated special effects to achieve a subtle manipulation of the movement of the faces of his figures. Internal dramas and silenced monologues: the works of Juan Muñoz speak with a mute eloquence of the palpable presence of emptiness and the inescapable dilemmas of time and space.

The last week of the exhibition, Muñoz opens the central space, breaking with the idea of closure imposed during the exhibition, inviting the public to walk through it freely and to coexist with the sculptures. The Palace has been transformed into an open room, an open floor where the audience, seated, attends the concert by the English composer Gavin Bryars Ensemble.

The Face of Pirandello. Juan Muñoz

Allow me an image: the image of Pirandello's face.

Allow me a second image that perhaps explains the first: the image of a man who over the months buys several books by Pirandello. At first, he does it just to read his theater. Then he buys a few more books, this time not by Pirandello, but about Pirandello. Perhaps to browse through the framework. Throughout the weeks, this man, every time he places or removes one of the books from the shelf, he stares for a few seconds at the covers and back covers of the books. Going back and forth from the shelf to the table and back again, the attention begins to focus, again and again, on the hat that the Italian playwright always wears in all the photos. (...)

In this 1906 photo the look is still condescending. You have to wait a few years for the lower eyelid to become a huge eyebrow. Just a few years. "Ogni forma non debe esser né antica né moderna, ma unica". A face like an almond. The goatee below, carefully cut. The hat. And the rain. Maybe the hand near the cheekbone on the cover of Borsellino's essay. But it's anecdotal. Just the rain. The hat. Because it rains. It always rains. It's hard to know how long this rain has persisted, fast, pouring. Maybe since always. Falling on an indifferent conversation. It doesn't rain a little. No. It rains everything, it rains a whole that falls throughout the hours. Throughout the night on this conversation that does not know. But it is also true that this rain that hits insistently, is also indifferent to that conversation. It just falls and falls.

That's why the hat, "un capello di feltro", to apparently shade that elongated face like an almond. A hat that casts a shadow over eyes that are all eyes.

We begin once again. This room. The chair. The table. In front of us the faces that are covers and back covers of books bought at random, a little at random. Again and again Pirandello's face covered by a hat. Inside this room it rains. On top of these books, although when you touch them, they are not wet, it rains.

No fiction. I speak of a sleepless rain that falls day and night on a normal conversation. An immutable, fundamental rain, without interpretations. Falling on the shoulders, on the sleeves, into the hands of a figure that says to the other: "Do you have the time?" (...)

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. MNCARS, Madrid, 1997).