What desire or obsession does the artist have when he feels he must accentuate the unsaid? What symptoms remain manifest in a society, so that a warning sign changes the commonplace of its existence?

This exhibition brings together the research process undertaken by the artist Víctor Muñoz since 2018. Medellín, as is the title of the show, has been the object of study and permanent reinterpretation throughout his career, and in this display, he sends a current and vindicating signal of this as a place of enunciation. The exhibition comprises five bodies of work that allude to and question the denominative and referential notion of the city as a global icon, urban brand, marketing stereotype or confusing touristic lure.

In the main room of the gallery, from the focal point of the external window to the back rooms, the paper series 'Flash and Accents' displays the memories of gunshot impacts that the artist deliberately made in a shooting range. The ready-made piece 'Luminaria', reconstructed with fragments of a lamp post from the Monaco building -former residence of the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar- which extends on the floor like a skeleton that fruitlessly invokes light amid anxiety; it is complemented by 'Señal Analógica', a sequence printed by an electronic facsimile machine that vomits data and schemes of the commercial prototype of the lamp, with no other pretext than to allude to the clarity of a diffuse past. This anteroom ends with the sequence of metallic boards with the word MEDELLÍN, perforated with 9 mm ammunition, accentuating the letter i in its sonority: 'Puntos sobre las íes' expressing, among other meanings, the violent obsession of the narco subculture to assert a place in the world.

The exhibition sets a contiguity with the side room to the central courtyard where the series 'Señales' is staged, a reconceptualization as the previous sequence, to the urban signs of the artist Adolfo Bernal made in the eighties: with actions in the sky with flares creating a new cardinality emphasized in the triangle that is defined by the typology of the terrace of his house, giving Manrique -his neighborhood- the sense of a new place of enunciation as a city. Unlike the orientation proposed by Bernal with ‘Norte’, the arrow in Muñoz points to and vindicates the notion of ‘Sur’.

It is from the daily confusion of signs and signals that Muñoz's Medellín habitually presents, that we feel warnings and strangeness when an explosion sounds, “is that a bullet, is that gunpowder?, what was that sound?”.

Carlos Uribe - Curator