Antes De Que Nuestra Inocencia Fuera Perdida

Antes de Que Nuestra Inocencia Fuera Perdida, Eric Muñoz’s first solo exhibition with Anonymous Gallery, is an installation that addresses themes such as sex, decay, memory and loneliness. In an analysis of the mundane that includes sculpture, video and photography, Muñoz enters into a dialogue about life through the graphics that live as povera poetry on the walls and doors of bars and bathrooms.

The chance meetings occurred in these spaces happen through codes and signs delivered by way of messages that serve as the beginning of a ritual. Decadence is the immediate attraction of what remains in our memories. The forgotten aspects entwine with moments of daily life in a reflection of society’s concern with immediacy; consuming and disposing.

Approached from a symbolic, creative and ironic perspective, through disparate forms and attitudes, Eric Muñoz reveals anonymous and instant satisfactions that result in a shared and collective solitude. Graphisms that represent desires normally repressed in order to survive in society are framed in images taken with a cellphone camera. The images, like a stamp, show not only the deconstruction of traditional photography production, but high levels of cynicism and the resignation of a population that has moral double standards with what is exploited in an intimate space, but still available to the public. The photographs full of texture and color, with austere taste, reveal text and symbolism in different layers; one over the other, eliminating the previous. This morbid voyeurism is perceived as horror once we understand the treatment of the body as reproduced goods through crude depictions of anatomy, sexual vows, and unidentified contacts through means of secret decrees.

Cigarette butts are like the graphics from bathrooms, they exist as remnants of what might have been a big party the day before, or a meeting place where the remains of humanity are exposed. As a social anthropologist, Muñoz uses sculpture to carefully observe what permeates through waste and converts the viewer into part of the story, in the first person, inviting them to meddle or get involved; to identify or reject. The spatial arrangement of the installation allows the objects to read as a whole, or allow one can get involved through personal experience.

The defining moment of this research in identity is impregnated through the ordinary and tribal. Through the use of video projected at the center of the gallery, as a contemporary vanitas, a lit cigarette is consumed slowly and inevitably, in beautiful and impeccable solitude.