OSCAR MURILLO

A Telegram to my dear Suki builds on a sequence of recent exhibitions by Murillo including The flooded garden at Tate Modern, London (2024), and Espíritus en el Pantano, which is on view at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, until August 10, 2025. These projects transformed their institutional venues into sites of collective expression by inviting visitors to inscribe and layer their own gestures onto canvas installed throughout each space. Through this act of participation, the museum becomes a social arena, visibly underscoring the possibilities and challenges of collectivity, communion, and shared culture.

In A Telegram to my dear Suki, Murillo meditates on the potential and fragility of communicative mark making. A single gesture on a surface activates it, charging it with energy that may be echoed, erased, or expanded upon by another. These ideas of diffusion, exchange, connection, and rupture take on a particular urgency in the current cultural and political climate. Included in the exhibition are examples of Murillo’s Flight drawings (2012–), works on paper produced by the artist while he is seated aboard an aircraft. Defined by their economy of materials, the results take shape on small sheets of paper, or on larger pieces that have been folded and refolded. The tools—pen, pencil, and carbon paper—are minimal, and Murillo works on both sides of each sheet, building up densely layered compositions in which words and markings obscure each other. The drawings are intimate yet unselfconscious; inspired by automatism, they allow gesture to operate as a form of liberated communication.

Also on view are several Telegram paintings (2013–). These works emerge from the archive or “dataset” generated by Murillo’s Frequencies project, an expansive undertaking initiated in 2013 that saw canvases installed on school desks worldwide, surfaces which then accumulated unconscious and deliberate marks made by students over time. In the intimate paintings that serve as a record of this simmering expanded encounter, Murillo “tunes in” to individual canvases, his interventions forming a dialogue with the layered marks of his youthful collaborators.

Finally, a selection of surge (social cataracts) paintings (2018–) lays bare the breakdown of communication. These works feature dense fields of blue oil stick, applied to canvas in wavelike formations that flood the visual plane. The effect is one of painterly inundation that Murillo has related to water’s capacity to obliterate, to erase all in its path. Clarity dissolves and comprehension falters, yet within this obliteration lies potential. If water functions as a force of destruction, it also gestures toward renewal—toward the possibility of clearing away in order to begin again. The ocean, in its multifaceted nature, becomes a particularly potent metaphor in the Greek context, resonating with a nation encircled by the Ionian, Aegean, and Mediterranean seas. Indeed, each body of work in the exhibition holds this sense of potential and latency, offering not resolution, but instead a mesmerizing ambiguity in which new meanings, new ideas, new voices might yet emerge.