Oscar Murillo: Masses

The ocean, the sea, or any liquid mass has the capability to create and erase itself with each new wave that surfaces. Oscar Murillo’s (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) practice relates in many ways to the oscillating force of water, an infinite flow of conception and undoing, pointing to his interest in the notion of cultural exchange and the circulation of ideas, languages and objects.

This solo exhibition, titled Masses, establishes a cartography of mass—liquid, material, sonic—across a large-scale installation that opens with a panorama of expansive gestural paintings titled Disrupted Frequencies. They are heavily marked in varying shades of blue, resembling a dark tide washing over the space. These new paintings are the outcome of the current juncture where Murillo finds himself, almost a decade after he initiated the long-term project Frequencies through which he and his team of collaborators distributed raw canvases across schools all over the world. Affixed to school desks, they were drawn upon, tagged and illustrated by school children for over 6 months and sent back to the artist afterwards. Murillo treats these canvases as analogue recording devices and the sheer volume allows him to tap into a collective consciousness—a cultural and social frequency—away from the anecdotal intricacies of where and by whom the drawings were created. Drawing on a tradition of abstraction, they are grounded by a deep understanding of the material and socio-political realities at present.