Once a centre of British political life when it was the home of home of Lord Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury who was twice the Prime Minister of Britain, the house in the heart of Mayfair still exudes its 18th century elegance. Something is amiss though. On walking up the elegant staircase, a smell of oil starts to permeate from the elegant first floor drawing room. Inside, black painted canvases hang like dirty washing across the three tall Georgian windows. There are more canvases scattered throughout the room; some are neatly folded and piled on pallets; others are roughly sewn together and thrown across the floor and onto trolleys. The intoxicating smell of the oil paint fills the room. What is this? Is it an artist’s studio? Have squatters taken over? Surely it can’t be an artists’s studio – the canvases would not all be coated black, nor left on the floor to be covered in dirty footprints and why are the trolleys also full of rocks. Why would such dirty rocks be in an artist’s studio? Does this space reflect on the conditions in which many workers in Latin America have to work to earn enough to look after their families while they extract valuable minerals such as copper and gold for the rich nations of the world? In this, there are links with Brazilian photographer (b. 1944), whose work was exhibited in London at King’s College London in 2012 and with a small selection currently on display at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, whose black and white photographs reflects on the contrast of the harsh cruel conditions in which many South American people work to the tenderness, warmth and dignity of their families.
Oscar Murillo (b 1986) is a talented young Columbian artist who now lives in London. His exhibition occupies the ground and first floors of David Zwirner’s gallery in the 18th-century Georgian townhouse at 24 Grafton Street which has been sensitively refurbished by architect Annabelle Selldorf of New York practice Selldorf Architects with the new galleries around a beautiful spiral staircase.. The exhibition’s title, “binary function”, refers to the pairings that are a characteristic of Murillo’s work, so the black canvases, rocks and trolleys are at the one time both work in progress and a finished art installation, contrasting with the whiteness of the gallery spaces. Murillo invites viewers to become involved in “the dual process of production and consumption” as his “binary pairings” work together to create something much deeper and thought-provoking than the individual works.
The exhibition also includes a video projection of a street scene at New Year in La Paila, Colombia, which combines documentary and experiemental work in both the video and the soundtrack permeating through the gallery, several of Murillo’s paintings which are full of energy and vitality and contain random dust, footprints and handprints from his studio, and his new work “Material alignment”, where several different canvases, apparently cut from larger paintings , are carefully stitched together to create something coherent and ordered from the apparently dispirit and chaotic offcuts of different works.
Order and chaos at this exhibition are working together at many different levels to create a “binary function”.
