Isabel Muñoz

Mare Piedra

Federico Garcia Lorca, who first evoked the ‘petrified octopus’, sang the praises of the Mediterranean on many occasions. Although it wasn’t salty seawater that inspired him — he preferred his water from springs, with lemon cast by a gypsy. Rather it was the alliance of sky and Corinthian capitals that preside over the birth of the Gods, headed by Dionysius and Eros, making Venus the navel of the sea.

Isabel Muñoz has traversed — with the strange exception of Greece, that was perhaps too primeval — the shores of Mare Nostrum. The centre of attention in her work relating to the sea is not the purity of the water, the sailing boats, the fishing-smacks, the nets, the ports, the colours or any human anecdote, nor even the landscape as such. Rather, her Mediterranean is at once solar and made of stone.

From Andalusia to Egypt and from Turkey to Rome, she focuses, sometimes with asperity, on sculpted figures that bear witness to the civilisation and myths, from the Cyclades to the baroque, from Arabian influences to echoes of the Orient. Her male and female dancers are inscribed, often in fragmented form, on architecture that is no longer décor but solidified time, memories of rites and myths. She tracks the light and the snare, in depicting the wings of a Roman angel or observing herself in an oiled patina on the bodies of Turkish wrestlers.

We have known for some time that the appearance of dance and physical practices that are more than mere folklore and on which Isabel Muñoz based her work was only a lure. Formal evidence for expressing the body in its sensuality and reproducing it in the subtleties of platinum prints.

As these photographs taken in the Mediterranean basin are assembled, another fact relating to photography makes its appearance: the link with sculpture. Sculpture as fabrication and invention of space, sculpture as a question of material and, therefore, sculpture as a dialogue with light.

For this reason, for photography, the Mediterranean of Isabel Muñoz is composed not of water, seductions or mirages, but stone.

Christian Caujolle
Curator of the exhibition