Antonio Muniz

Antonio Muñiz was born and raised in Chihuahua, México. From an early age, he came to understand that life was rather rigid, defined by boundaries and expectations which did not fit my natural instincts. His first ever painting was at nine years old, of a room with four walls in the house of his mother.

In 1996 he graduated with a BA from San Diego’s New School of Architecture in an attempt to find expression and freedom in his life. His architectural background allowed him to explore space and living from a more organic, creative, and free-form perspective. Further exploring the physical bounds of his expressiveness, he found that painting allowed him to expand his creative vision further outside formal walls.

Antonio being a self taught painter was introduced to Rodrigo Pimentel in ’06, a Mexican post-war & contemporary painter. Antonio was drawn to their akin personalities and their ritualistic conversations and began working with him as my mentor. Pimentel taught him how to read art and bare his own chest in its process.

Rodrigo taught him how a line didn’t have to be just a straight line, but could be a matrix of organic shapes with a definitive start and end point. Pimentel cracked open his imagination to the abstract, to unconscious automatism, and subconscious expression.

Including Pimentel, Antonio was most influenced by the work of Roberto Matta, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, and Albert Oehlen. Particularly-Mattas’ biomorphic shapes that occasionally cohere into representational forms, Varo’s infusion of philosophic inquiry through mystical and visionary landscapes, Tanning’s meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes that transcended reality, and Oehlen’s commitment to rigorous formalism and abstract delicacy.

While studying the Surrealists Antonio discovered the technique of “fumage”, now a fundamental pillar in his work. He is fascinated by the smoke’s ability to mutate forms, and its unpredictable urgency for freedom. Antonio feels deeply akin and attracted to how the smoke’s movement inhabits a canvas. Its autonomic application serves as a compositional skeleton for his work while the ritualistic action of burning cleanses, burning away bad habits, ingrained behaviors, and linear thinking, ultimately encouraging flexibility and deeply reflective expression.