Oscar Murillo’s ‘manifestation’ is a literal sense of the 21st-century world we all live in. Seven giant paintings by the artist cover the walls of the Saint Louis Art Museum. The pigment is thick in most places, and scribbled lines and bursts of raw color dominate the canvas. Aggressive lines are found dotted across the canvas and the usage of the sheer volume of paint represents the emotion of the artist as he composed his works. The exhibition speaks about the personal agitation of the artist and seeks to provide onlookers with a visual metaphor of the shaky political, and economical world we are living in at the moment. There is a sense of urgency in the work, and the metaphor and the philosophy that Murillo used to paint resonates with all of us.
The size, density, and frantic energy of each painting’s field of black make it sufficiently commanding that it could serve as a compositional core against which other forms’ qualities and locations might be calibrated. Instead, the disregard shown by the black lines helps us realize the cacophony in which our daily lives exist, quite similar to a bunch of radios playing different stations simultaneously.