One thing leads to another, but the beauty of this game lies in not knowing when that will happen and where it will lead us. You look at a string and realize it has a beginning and an end, but who’s to say that the start is the end held in your left hand and not the one resting in your right hand? Something similar happened to Manu Muñoz (Cabo de Gata, 1977) with painting.

At thirteen, he was holding a spray can. It was to help some friends with a mural, and suddenly, he found himself immersed in the world of graffiti. The idea was enticing: confronting a monumental scale, somehow ‘occupying’ a space in the world (not just physically), becoming part of something that was inevitably going to be seen by everyone… Before you know it, you’ve spent four years submerged in these realms of urban art. And, obviously, whether you want it or not, it influences how this creator approaches painting today.

But there was still a leap to be made because we are in a moment, the mid to late nineties when graffiti was not so well-received in galleries and museums. Paradoxically, at 17, when he practically had to decide what he would do in the future, Muñoz was invited to participate in a group exhibition with a painting, which he also managed to sell. The artist admits that he operates on impulses when he works, and it’s clear that these shifts in his biography are what have given rise to the work he creates today. Manu Muñoz didn’t not want to be a painter, but rather unconsciously, almost randomly, not so much securing steps but hopping and leaping like someone playing hopscotch, he has shaped his style.

“I am aware,” he says, “that I can only develop one percent of what I propose to do. That’s why I’m not afraid of change.” In the instruction manual of his painting, there is the premise of moving on to something else once he has mastered the technique, but, and let me use the word ‘paradox’ again, we find recurrences, spaces that, because they are so personal, allow us to recognize him throughout his career.

One of them is scale. Of course, Muñoz knows how to overcome the challenges of a small format (although he “suffers a lot” from it, he admits), but he excels in large scales, the ones he learned on the streets, in mural painting, which leads to another of his overwhelming reflections: “In the studio, you feel immortal. Even though you know you’re going to die, there, you are the one who truly controls everything.” It’s no wonder, then, that the word “impulse” is one of the most referenced in his vocabulary.

Manu Muñoz’s paintings are populated by recognizable figures. After all, the artist finds one of his main sources of inspiration in Sargent, the realist painter. There is also an obvious look at nature, at elements and creatures distinguishable from the animal and plant kingdoms, as well as a certain inclination towards portraiture. However, and paradoxically, it could be said that the model or models that star in his compositions are secondary. In reality, they are archetypes, and in this sense, one can speak of his work as not so much figurative but rather symbolic; a shuttle that allows him to work with the material, immerse himself in composition, and pursue new strategies. Nature itself is vast and timeless, which is why it is recurrent in his work, and his models, paradigms of war, pleasure (medieval warriors, geishas, samurais starring in canvases like ‘Shy Guy,’ the ‘Napoleonic Dragon of ‘How to Scare the Devil,’ or ‘Ultraviolet Dreams’), are very much intertwined in the popular imagination with considerable spiritual and fantastical connotations.

The motifs are therefore simple, devoid of narrative, where what matters is both the formal composition of the painting and the study of color and technique. Figuration is just an excuse, a map, a guide from which to experiment and get lost as an artist with the work and then find oneself. Another paradox. In fact, Muñoz composes on the computer, arriving at the studio with clear ideas after previous research. One could say that he leaves nothing to improvisation, but what he really accomplishes is winning the compositional battle against the painting. And then it is easy to discover in the final results of the canvases certain ‘sweeps,’ as if a thick stroke drawing tool had been passed over the screen with the mouse, which on the canvas becomes a powerful impulse. These are the ‘hairs’ or ‘fringes’ of, for example, ‘Asian Dancer.’ Giving in to the paths of emotions. An obstacle for the viewer to concentrate on the figure and make an effort to immerse themselves in the proposal.

In addition, if the surface is wood, the artist doesn’t hesitate to use a sander, resulting in surfaces where the pictorial pigment as incarnation is torn from the canvas’s skin. This is irrefutable proof from this creator that painting, the process, is never linear, it doesn’t go in a single direction. It doesn’t start at one point and reach another. There are advances and setbacks. There are battles won and others lost, albeit less so.

Not only that: in the artist’s recent work, the three-dimensional begins to occupy, paradoxically, a space within the two-dimensional. And the artist uses silicon castings that lead to molds so that the final appearance is not that of a separate object stuck on the canvas, but that this protrusion is an essential part of what is shown. A Mediterranean Bram Bogart, whom he mentions. I told you that Muñoz’s painting is not as fast-consumable as it might seem at first glance. It takes time. You have to decipher it like someone trying to open an old safe and carefully manipulating its mechanism, waiting for the definitive click.

On this journey, you will find a new ally, a resource also crucial in his work, which is color. In fact, color is the first thing he works on in the preliminary phase before arriving at the studio. Let me give you an example: the monumental ‘Buceador,’ with a pink sea in which a swimmer in blue tones dives. José Manuel Broto used to say that he tended to paint with colors that ‘looked bad.’ Muñoz doesn’t exactly do that, but he uses tones that once again ‘bother’ us, prick our eyes. They force us to draw conclusions or seek explanations. Pink, to which I referred earlier, becomes a hallmark precisely because of all the arbitrary connotations that surround it. It breathes life into a new impulse.

Manu Muñoz creates all his work in an almost paradisiacal place, his studio in Cabo de Gata. But paradoxically, he says, the context doesn’t influence much. It’s hard to believe. Three hundred comfortable, humble square meters, enviable light, and sand that, on windy days.