| Spanish painter Nacho Murillo, who recently held a show at Broadway Gallery and is currently completing a residency in Beijing, highlights the act of drinking coffee is as just that: action repeated (complacently) ad infinitum. This is shown in the body of work wherein he made many, many, many paintings of…. You guessed it, the coffee cup. Taken as a whole, the series grossly exaggerates the common object to the point where viewers are forced to reconsider ideas of ritual and objecthood. |
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Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh on Nacho Murillo
Maybe it’s the peace that comes with the morning sun and a well creased newspaper. Or maybe they just need to wake up. But people love coffee. They drink it day in and day out. Unlike smoking or drug use or biting one’s nails, it’s not a habit that one feels need be broken. It is endlessly repeated and unquestioned, defining and outlining the daily experience. Action without agency if you will.
Spanish painter Nacho Murillo, who recently held a show at Broadway Gallery and is currently completing a residency in Beijing, highlights the act of drinking coffee is as just that: action repeated (complacently) ad infinitum. This is shown in the body of work wherein he made many, many, many paintings of…. You guessed it, the coffee cup. Taken as a whole, the series grossly exaggerates the common object to the point where viewers are forced to reconsider ideas of ritual and objecthood.
Murillo’s paintings make reference to movements as disparate as Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop. Of course the repetition of a singular object reminds one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Tomato Soup Cans. Like Warhol’s cans, Murillo’s paintings adopt the notion of repetition with variation; suggesting that the cup, like every signifier in the sign-system, changes meaning as it changes context, or as in Murillo’s case, changes meaning as it moves across color and media.
Warhol once said, “I love boring things,” and it would seem that Murillo has the same love for (or obsession with) the cup. As many as Murillo paints, there is only one kind he represents—the coffee cup. Not the mug, not the glass, but the coffee cup, with a saucer. It’s a simple object repeated ad naseum. Murillo’s work takes the familiar and twists it into a bitter perspective on ritual and obsession.
Included in this series of paintings, Murillo also collages these symbols of quotian life with magazine or newspaper cutouts. The mixture of Chinese text, English commentary, recognizable symbols, and graphic imagery all present a intensely layered contrast. In one painting, a page ripped from a fashion magazine has been cut into the shape of a cup, overlapping with a painted cup of white lines. Buried below the cups are images of models wearing flowery dresses, and a Chinese text reading “Decoding Fashion.” In another piece, Murillo painted a white cup on a series of classified ads and a Chinese news article about Clinton, Bill Gates, and the books they each read. The random combination is perplexing—layers of meaning come to the surface through the various media. But with Murillo, where there is of course the subjective experience of painting, as with all painting, there is no objective understanding of his work. Rather the content lacks meaning, but the lack of meaning is perhaps meaning in and of itself.
In translating the coffee cup into a foreign language—images of mass-media chaos amidst equally chaotic paint gestures—Murillo ruptures the notion of the everyday and confronts it with a nonsensical playfulness. The act of painting becomes an act of deconstruction, preventing the viewer from falling into a state of complicity. Murillo’s work responds to kitsch and abstraction, and as one looks deeper into the work one begins to see each stroke that set the quotidian in motion. The singularity of the object and its repetition across many paintings redefines the notion of common objects, makes one question quiescence. Murillo radically transforms the ordinary object into an abstraction, a fragment of his wild imagination.
What is the function of a cup except that of a container? Here it can also be a Chinese news story about a crime or a woman in her lingerie. In the end, Murillo’s cups transform the idea of an ordinary object into the imagery of abstractionism and the radicalization of the daily, the unquestioned—there are just too many to process, and in trying one begins to question one’s one rituals. So is the cup half empty or half full? Who the hell cares.
