Rene Matić / Oscar Murillo. JAZZ.

Curators: What, How & for Whom / WHW and Laura Amann

The duo show, JAZZ., presents Rene Matić (b.1997, Peterborough, UK) and Oscar Murillo (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) together for the first time. Both artists present existing works as well as new commissions made specifically in response to the space and the city of Vienna. Encompassing painterly gestures, installation, film, photography, and sound, each element on show is in dialogue, shaped by Murillo’s black canvas installation which is suspended from the ceiling throughout the space. Together, through dissection and reconciliation, both artists explore the impossibilities and contradictions that arise from notions of desire, visibility and opacity. In contrast to transparency, opacity simply accepts that everything that makes us us cannot be understood completely.

Coming from differing vantage points and mediums, both artists employ gesture and abstraction within their practices. Murillo chooses the social over the subjective and the collective over the individual, while Matić’s practice is often grounded in the personal. At the heart of Murillo’s work is gestural painting, reminiscent of action painting, akin to the use of dance in Matić’s videos, as they both share a spontaneous, unbothered and unscripted nature. Additionally, both artists succeed in carving out a space of independence for themselves in a cultural context that is determined to classify and smooth out everything and everyone. By creating room for discontinuous and new thinking they reformulate one’s (art-)historical narratives and genealogies.

In the exhibition, Oscar Murillo’s large-scale black canvases are suspended from the ceiling to create an almost labyrinthine structure, they carefully shape the space, allowing for intimate encounters with the works, such as fields of spirits (2023) and Telegram (2016–2023). Both series are based on the collaborative Frequencies project in which Murillo covers tables in schools around the world with canvases for pupils to paint, draw and doodle freely.

Working with fragments – made in different spaces and time periods, and moved from place to place only to be stitched together or reworked layer by layer – has long been at the core of Murillo’s work. It’s a practice that highlights the presence of the many hands and vastly different geographical contexts that permeate his paintings, sculptures, and performances.

Circling Murillo’s structure but also deeply embedded in it, we find Rene Matić’s contributions to the exhibition. Four new commissions take Vienna’s reaction and “outrage” to Josephine Baker’s appearance in the city in 1928 as a starting point. With the film works redacted and climax, the photo series (out of) place and the sound work voice, Matić refers to the reactions that Baker triggered in Vienna, which was an arch-Catholic city at the time.