Fruta del tiempo: Mirus Gallery, San Francisco, USA.

Fruta del Tiempo.
Text by Rafael Schacter

Fresh.

Fresh and sweet.

Fresh and sweet and juicy and fragrant with a sharp, tart, back-end punch.

It’s not that sickly sweet. Not that artificial, synthesized, saccharine sweet that’s all bark and no bite.

This is that perfect mango, that fresh papaya or guava, that sublimely ripe piece of fruit that shakes your senses awake like a cold shower. That seasonal fruit whose colour you can practically taste, whose flavour you can almost see.

Muñoz’s Fruta del Tiempo aims to invoke these same visceral, synesthetic responses. A series first initiated in Mexico –  a site, much like the artist’s birthplace and home Andalucía, in which the landscape, the gastronomy, the produce, the people, all resonate with this natural vivacity – the title itself appeals directly toward the physical sensations that these natural delicacies can bring, the intense sweetness that both powers up your endorphins and cuts you like a knife. Working on a full exhibition series of works for the first time however (he previously having had the graffiti artist’s urgency toward the constantly new), here Muñoz thus delivers a group of abstract works that recreate the tangible experience of freshness, the immediacy, the balance of the finest fruta del tiempo, within their very material, visual form.

Yet Muñoz’s works not only signal toward the formal qualities of fruta del tiempo, their colours, their flavour, their bite. Rather, they are as much about process as final image, an attempt by the artist to recreate the bodily experience of taste within the flow and act of painting itself. Like the graffiti output so key to Muñoz’s contemporary practice, what is key here is hence a gestural performance containing the same raw, crisp, natural energy of the eponymous fruta del tiempo: Produced without additives or preservatives. Unprocessed and organic. Fresh and ready to eat.