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Then he'll photograph his creation with a copy camera (his cat has been known to destroy thread works prematurely, Stainback says) and send that off to the lab for processing into the large-format images that end up on the walls. Typically, Muniz will make a quick 8-by-10 inch sketch in, say, syrup, using tweezers and toothbrushes to push the sticky chocolate across the page, or to pile up sugar. The photographs of all these drawings, Stainback says, are vastly enlarged over the originals. When he came back, he used the pictures as a guide for his portraits in sugar on black paper.
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Similarly, the artist traveled to Haiti and took snapshots of kids working in the sugar cane fields for the series Sugar Children. He memorializes these kids in drawings made of carnival debris, their ghostly black and white figures emerging from the colorful trash of confetti papers and ziptop lids. His series Aftermath deals with the street children in his native Brazil who reportedly have been murdered by the authorities to make the streets more quaint for tourists.
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Muniz is not always the joyous prankster bent on puncturing solemn assumptions, however. The famous Life magazine pictures of Jackson Pollock reproduce very well in chocolate sauce: what could be better than the sticky syrup for calling up Pollock's famous paint drips on canvas? Muniz's version asks the implicit question: is oil paint always superior to chocolate? Is a Renaissance fresco necessarily better than a big photograph of Bosco? And are they more real? "The Last Supper" is a finely detailed triptych, the anguished face of Christ and the gestures of the apostles lovingly detailed in Bosco. The Pictures with Chocolate, my personal favorites, are merry evocations of landmark works in art history. Muniz has glued cotton onto gray papers, like a little kid making cloud pictures, photographed them, and presented them with oh-so-serious art-historical titles, such as "Durer's Praying Hands," or deadpan: "Pig" and "Snail." The cotton-ball series, for instance, is a send-up of Alfred Stieglitz's serious Equivalents photos of clouds that look like other things. Muniz is on a serious mission to "blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between high art and kitsch," as Stainback has written in the exhibition catalog but he's also a wit, a comedian in chemicals and emulsive papers, whose art is partly a colossal joke on American culture. "He uses our believability in the power of photographs.He subverts the pictures and makes us think about photography."
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"Vik makes illusions that are double-takes," says exhibition curator Charles Ashley Stainback, director of the Skidmore College art museum and former director of the International Center of Photography in New York. With their faithful rendering of some of our most prized images - in the most disdained art materials - the photographs undermine our notions of what is real and what is fake. The pictures document for all time his short-lived drawings, ephemeral series in chocolate and tomato sauce, in sugar, thread and cotton balls, in dirt and clay. Close to 100 large-format photos by Muniz are on view at a big summer show at the Center for Creative Photography, Vik Muniz: Seeing Is Believing. The famous bed from Arles is deftly rendered in fine wire.Įven curiouser is that this master of all materials is known primarily as a photographer. Medusa's face emerges from marinara sauce and spaghetti noodles. Yes, he's done John John in conventional pencil and charcoal, but his "Last Supper" is a masterpiece in Bosco chocolate syrup. What's curious, though, is what Muniz uses to make his drawings. Van Gogh's bed, Medusa's head, and even little John John saluting - Muniz can dash off copies of all these with uncanny likeness to the originals.