Oscar Murillo: A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise
Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice, 17 September - 27 November 2022
Picasso said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. Oscar Murillo's exhibition A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise, at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice, similarly takes its lead from the strength and spontaneity of children's drawings. Through various techniques of display - archival, multimedia installation, paintings suspended from the ceiling by wires - the show attempts to capture the optimism of childhood and inject it into Murillo's painterly output.
Though child labour is banned in most industries, art, as so often is the case, makes itself an exception. Since 2013, Murillo has invited thousands of children across the world to doodle on canvases attached to their school desks. These have been returned and stacked on shelves on the ground floor of the Scuola Grande for visitors to leaf through. The huge archive of cartoon figures, three-dimensional lettering, embellished names and inspirational quotes show that, given the same materials, children the world over do similar things.
Some canvases have been carefully planned, others are accumulations of scribbles, but despite their buoyant energy they soon become repetitive to look at. Their role in the exhibition seems to be to provide a voice for Murillo to engage with in dialogue. He does this in two ways. The first is via a video installation where visitors step into a room of wall-to-ceiling video projections. Photographs of dozens of the children's canvases cluster together in response to visitors' movement through the space, mirroring the movements of our bodies.
The link established between the form of the video and the motion of the visitors doesn't impart meaning to the images, since there's nothing particularly significant about people waving their arms in front of a screen, try as they might to make the video do something interesting. It seems instead to be an example of technological spectacle employed for its own sake, but even as spectacle it fails, since in 2022 having a video follow them around the room is not going to impress even the most enthusiastic five-year-old (though I can think of certain adults who could be seduced by it).
Upstairs everything is different. Drawings framed in perspex hang from the ceiling next to walls full of gently flaking Renaissance frescoes. One drawing has such charisma that I assumed it must be the work of a child, with dark pencil lines incised into the paper and the letter A insistently repeating across it; but it's Murillo's. Several of his canvases are suspended elsewhere in the room, characterised by heavy splodges in limited, primary palettes. Amongst these are some more of the students' canvases in glass cases.
Murillo's and the children's drawings converge at their optimism, even naivety, which is perhaps the secret ingredient Picasso spent his life relearning. For the kids, the optimism is for their lives to come. 'One day everything gonna be more easy than now', writes a student from Oman. This feeling seeps into the sense of exploration and discovery in Murillo's marks. His paintings and drawings emerge from and towards the promise that, practise for long enough, and you might stumble upon something precious and new, and then offer it to the world. What could be more worth preserving than that?