The lithographic print, Diagram Drawing - Edition #1, is a new development within Muñoz’s multidisciplinary visual practice, and stems directly from his ongoing series of graphite and sumi ink ‘diagram drawings’. A skilled draftsman, Muñoz carefully plans his compositions using a mixture of analog and digital drawing. The duotone print was created from an original artwork, made specifically for this edition. Muñoz hand-inked the film from which the lithographic plate was burned, and the light-to-mid tones were printed with graphite, staying true to Muñoz’s drawing process. Graphite as a material choice offers a plethora of associations and tangents relevant to Muñoz’s core concerns. Used as a lubricant of machinery and a wide range of disparate applications within the energy, communications and transportation industries, the unglamorous material can be found in touchscreens, solar panels, space satellites. Like diamonds, it is composed entirely of carbon, a substance that makes the world go round.

The inclusion of the artist’s fingerprints as a method of cross-hatching on the leaves of the apple works contrary to an aspect of his painting practice, in which the level of precise finish almost extinguishes the presence of the human. The artist’s consideration of analog and digital, hand and screen, was given a new avenue with the inclusion of a mechanized aspect to the production – a German offset printing press from the 1950s – a machine originally used for proofing advertising and news materials before being sent off to larger machines for mass production. A machine that was made obsolete by technological developments, and the eve of the computer era.

In relation to his drawing practice, Muñoz has said: ‘These drawings provide me space to investigate and consider imagery and the conceptual, intuitive ideas that may foreshadow subjects of the paintings. As I juxtapose different images together, I am able to sort through and examine the relationships of various images. In this way, the diagram is a space for my internal process of discovering associations.’ The term ‘Diagram’ suggests something didactic or closed - an instruction, or definition of proper function. Muñoz’s drawings however, act as constructed manuals of association between image, text and meaning. A type of visual poetry drawn from his observation of the movements of city and labor, in which seemingly clear symbols can lend themselves to many meanings and tangents.

A pill, a hardware store cooperative, a blast, an apple, a target. Handwritten bullet points. The symbols and logos of Muñoz’s visual vocabulary are at once identifiable and endlessly open to interpretation. The target brings to mind the crosshair registration marks of printmaking, or marksmanship, precision, violence. There are also connotations of the Garden’s fruit of wisdom, the folk tale of William Tell, the platitude of “an apple a day”, even the symbol of an omnipresent tech company, whose contemporary reach and influence can only be grasped in the abstract. Any reading offers a plentiful opportunity for inserting one’s politics. Paring away the visual abundance of the artist’s paintings – shimmer, texture, glitter and shine, the alluring colour gradients of fades and sunsets – the drawings and new print offer instead a stark graphic monochrome, unflinching.

1. A SENSE OF URGENCY AND IMMEDIACY. TIME BECOMES A PRESSURE POINT.

2. LONG TERM MAINTENANCE VS. SHORT TERM MAINTENANCE

3. THE GARDEN

4. FOREVER

Rather than serving as an index, the written text is a cerebral accumulation; a poetics of aspirations and conundrums glimpsed on the freeway commute. Formations from processing the visual soup that we consume daily while traversing urban space; being confronted and coerced with appeals to take, and to be given, and to accept, at our own cost. The American experience.