Vik Muniz is a Brazilian, New York-based artist, whose practice, closely connected to the medium of photography, the end product of Muniz's work, addresses arts visual consumption, while emphasizing the void between the act of looking and of seeing. Playing with the tension between abstraction and representation, the familiar and the unrecognizable, technology and craft, originality and reproduction, Muniz's work tests traditional understanding of photography as a factual representation of a built reality.

Using ephemeral everyday materials, such as wire, thread, sugar, dust, or, as is the case of - Tackle, 2000
, chocolate, Muniz creates drawings of objects, situations, people or crowds, which through their material nature, generate a strong sense of physicality.

Based on a found photographic image, - the
-
chocolate drawn reproduction, depicts a game of American football. Capturing an intense moment of the match, where players' bodies are portrayed in close proximity to one another, reminiscent of a pile. Part of the Crowds series, - Tackle
challenges conventional modes of seeing, namely regarding its relation to the body of the spectator, who, by his movement from, or towards the image, determines what and how is seen. While from up close the work appears to be abstract, by stepping away from the drawing and shifting the perception field, the depicted figures start bearing their shape, unveiling the actual image. Despite its strong connection to the medium of drawing, which in many ways creates a formal backbone of Muniz's practice, its final existence is materialized through photography, which locks the otherwise ephemeral image into lasting depiction while addressing ideas of reproduction and notions of originality.



Marketa Condeixa