Kunsthalle Wien presents Rene Matić (b.1997, Peterborough, UK) and Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) together for the first time.
For JAZZ. both artists present existing works as well as new commissions made specifically in response to the space and the city of Vienna. Encompassing painterly gestures, installation, film, photography, and sound, each element on show is in dialogue, shaped by Murillo’s black canvas installation which is suspended from the ceiling throughout the space.
Together, through dissection and reconciliation, both artists explore the impossibilities and contradictions that arise from notions of desire, visibility, and opacity.
Coming from differing vantage points and mediums, both artists employ gesture and abstraction within their practices. Murillo chooses the social over the subjective and the collective over the individual, while Matić’s practice is often grounded in the personal. Murillo’s works, and even titles, often reference the act of sending messages or of recording, intercepting, and tuning into, while Matić displays a deep concern with the reception of the image. Murillo’s paintings and drawings come to life through mark-making and gesture; Matić’s works use dance as a form of expression within the realm of the moving image and photography. In this sense, JAZZ.—a title that evokes many resonances and qualities within each artist’s practice—could be understood as a mode of artistic collaboration but also of reception: one where cultural sensibilities are blended, improvisation takes place and group interaction becomes as vital as the individual voice. JAZZ. nods to concepts of desire, of consumption of the Other, it plays with performativity while retaining the right to opacity.
While in some ways the practices of Matić and Murillo seem rather complementary to one another, they also overlap in important aspects. For instance, the gestural painting, reminiscent of action painting, that is so often at the heart of Murillo’s work is akin to the use of dance and dancing in Matić’s videos, as they both share a spontaneous, unbothered, and unscripted nature. Both artists also share intuition within their process and production, a calculated intuition. One could say intuition deployed strategically. Additionally, both artists succeed in carving out a space of independence for themselves in a cultural context that is determined to classify and smooth out everything and everyone. Claiming such a space first entails an act of “disaffiliation” (concept by Édouard Glissant), through which one breaks away from established traditions creating room for discontinuous and new thinking and then reformulating one’s (art-)historical narratives and genealogies both in an intellectual way but also in terms of personal relations.
