Self-portraits are another means that, in Muñoz’s poetics, are charged with meanings, and not specifically due to their reference to himself as a subject of experience, but rather as an enclave of existential concerns that the self-image, since it is not externally fixed, invests with a heightened subjective potential. In this form of representation the shared view of those two entities - that which is depicted and that which produces the image - vouches for the veracity of the result, since there is a particular relationship between them in which one and the other are mutually established.

The fact that the "self-portrait," instead of validating itself through its effect of depth, is offered to us as an inconsistent entity, devoid of a stable support or binding strength, is something that does away with artistic traditions -drawing, photography - which historically support the representation of that pre-existing, desirable ideal of human nature latent in the classic uses of such media.

It is known that acts of representation have enriched the individual’s ways of being in culture. An individual that - as is the case in this work - "sees" himself; as a permanent fact of dismemberment and dissolution, constitutes a definitive attack against the fundamental, fixed forms of identity that our culture of definitions, with its rhetorical visual posture, has disseminated.

The distressing and disquieting accent is heightened by the expressive impulse of the material, and is totally condensed through the mixture of media. The temporality of his work, its interaction with real circumstances, imbues them with a vital élan imposed by the ghost-like power of an image. The subject is no more than a process, an act, a contingency; it has no precedent and its outcome is unpredictable.

Many of these reflections also apply to Re-trato (play on words in Spanish, meaning both Portrait and Re-treatment); a video loop that records the process whereby, through the use of brushstrokes using water, the artist’s hand stubbornly draws his own face on hot porcelain. The drawing tries in vain to capture his face’s identifying features, but the evanescent, fragile media repeatedly frustrate his efforts, thus converting his goal into a useless chimera.

As is the case with Narciso, this work does not depend on environmental factors(3) that activate different states in it; nevertheless, the attribute of image-time provided by the video makes it possible to confront the precarious nature of the brushstrokes constantly evaporating, and their ever differing, unpredictable remaking. It is a lucid approach whose precise visual economy arbitrates that absorbing cycle of appearance and gradual disappearance, of fruitless poiesis that takes us to the disintegration of its own ghost: that of the "I" seeking to reach its "sameness".

Re-trato leads us more towards its "nothing" than to something that constitutes an origin or something that can be grasped, and points to something that cannot be symbolized, which, elusive as a ferret - to quote Lacán--, escapes representation; that which while being itself cannot be enclosed or attained except as an eternally failed act.

The representation, ill-fated due to the precariousness of the media and subject to the regime of duration, is set internally to its own temporality, and this expels the drawing from its seat of honor in the structure of the constituent image. Here it is shown to be vulnerable and incapable of sustaining the expressiveness of the line, which under such circumstances offers an insurmountable resistance to the hand that creates it.

Conceived as a sign-time under conditions that remain adverse to its aim, said image elapses in a way that renders each moment crucial. All hierarchies are deposed, leaving us only with "nows" of a palpable intensity.

In regard to this piece we could rightfully apply a reflection by José Luis Brea on Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait, in which he points out that the latter "always shows the opposite of what was said of him, not the existence, but the total evanescence of the author"; on observing Van Gogh’s series, what is seen in it is nothing more than the tracking of the subject’s continuous disappearance: "what is shown is his giving himself by subtracting himself, as though he were in flight."(4)

Oscar Muñoz: Dissolution and phantasmagorias Part 2 Upcoming