It was only in the second half of the 19th century that the opportunities for creating works of art related to local traditions emerged. Caribbean specific modernism (modernismo) gained recognition. It was followed by the trends, which continued and developed the ideas of Dadaism (postumismo) and Impressionism (costumbrismo).
However, American occupation (1916 - 1924) and dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930 - 1961) put an end to the attempts of independent cultural development. Contemporary art of the Dominican Republic developing as part of international artistic arena continues the traditions of cubism, expressionism and abstraction. Apart from Luis Munoz, the central figure of this article, such painters as D. Suro, Ch. Colson and J. Hernandez Ortega also became popular all over the world.
After getting classical education, Luis Munoz left behind the National Academy of Arts (Belles Artes), which was founded in 1942 at the time of Trujillo (who was killed by his own people in 1961); in 1995, he continued his studies at the Academy Circulo de Bellas Artes, which is well-known in Europe for its progressive ideas.
The most intriguing thing about the works by Luis Muñoz is plastic and coloristic transformations experienced by his characters. Contemporary art applies very different attitudes towards the human body. The range is quite broad here. On the one hand, you can see photorealism here mediated by means of historical memory: the character is quite recognizable is about to vanish in the imagination of the spectator, under his intent look.
In this case, the details of appearance and entourage are put to test in terms of their authenticity...
Strange as it may seem, the other pole of character representation by Luis is abstraction, which becomes an aggregation of relative shapes only at the very end of imaginery counter embodiment path. An attentive eye, familiar with the evolution of abstraction classics' art will always notice certain similarities and traces.
What distinguishes Luis' anthropology is the active color of his compositions, the color, which seems to live its own life, determining the destiny of each image. Yes, one can see or guess the subject, yes - one can always trace certain scenography, but the final impression will still depend on intensity of coloristic experience that Luis' art evokes in the spectators. In this regard, the series created in the mid 90-s and titled "Acoustic bodies" is quite typical, This series serves as a wonderful illustration to such a fundamental notion of Delez' and Guattari's philosophy as "the body free of organs", which is defined in their classical opus "Anti-Oedipus". Authors say that "the body free of organs opposes its sliding, dim surface to the machines' parts... they oppose sighs and screams to phonetic sounds". It is incredible but this formula can serve as a description for the canvas named "Acoustic bodies -sitting", by Luis, 1994-95. "The Lady of Music", 1996, follows this trend. Extraction of sounds as a function, as an activity, is performed by a certain flickering body, which is intensively pulsing. It is the contemplation of this body, which generates "sounds of music" in the spectator's imagination.
In Luis' later works, the bodies depicted by him acquire the qualities of characters sometimes relative, such as "The Icon of the Sun and the Sea" 2006-07, and sometimes quite traditional, such as "The Lady and the Cat" 2005, or "Kiss - Passion" 2005.
Taking an attentive look at the works of Luis Muñoz and obviously seeing his hand in them, it becomes clear that this is a wonderful illustration of the point of view stating that art can remain art only by developing its ability resist fusion with the elements of the cultural industry, i.e., to penetrate them without losing identity. "If art loses this ability it ceases to be art" (John Roberts).
The fundamental character of Luis Muñoz' art can serve as proof of the thesis stating that it is the painting that represents the historical prototype of fine arts. A painting is sort of a brick forming the entire harmonious building of art, or, as Clement Grinberg says, "the driving force of art". The principle of a painting remains the same, no matter how much physical media changes. Even video documentation of performance is based on the proto-form of a painting. Thus, pictorialism is such a form of representation which can be correlated with a painting. The role of an artist in modern art is also connected with it: apart from representing his relevant aesthetic message, his professional task implies creation of the visual iconography system, which would include the mechanism of referring spectators back to the classical painting. Only this mechanism ensures self-identity of art in history.
Paintings of Luis Muñoz - being a symbol reflecting realities of the outside world - prove the existence of these realities and demonstrate authenticity of the things we see in the world created by God. A modernistic painting, on the contrary, is a symbol of an artist's inner reality: the one that turns out to be the only guaranteed reality because - if we believe Nietzsche - God dies at some point. Because any inner reality is personal, modernism can only produce "unconventional" things, which are interpreted by an intellectual mediator. The meaning of an aesthetic act moves to the field of interpretations and comments. Demonstrative simplicity of artistic tools is compensated by sophisticated intellectual efforts.
The phenomenon which attracts our attention to Luis' art, is creation of such "visual iconography", as on the one hand, objectifies the most relevant ideas of the modern artistic culture, and, on the other hand, preserves and continues the traditional classical principles of painting per se.
Joseph Backstein, Commissioner, Moscow Biannual of Contemporary Art
