Perpetual Beauty and the Abyss of Oblivion

Still from Heike Baranowsky, Schwimmerin, 2000

Over and over and over again, Baranowsky's swimmer swims. Stroke after stroke, never reaching the end of the pool. Suspended in the vast, eternal blue, there is an almost chilling sense of the eternal which comes into the mind on imagining this video sequence. Like a fear of the eternal, the infinite, the sublime awe of the vastness of space when staring out into the night sky. At once the most supreme moment of beauty, and the utmost terror. The futility of the self aloft comes to mind, of floating within this endless pool, an eternal recurrence of space, an endless video loop.

The sublimity of relentlessness and infinite eternality stares into the face of memory, and what it is to 'memorialise'. A friend recently sent me news of a Colombian artist, Oscar Muñoz, whose work balances on this fulcrum of the beauty of the perpetual. Munoz confronts memory itself, turning ideas of permanence as a signal of remembering, through painting with water, and "As one image is in the process of being created, the water images on the other screens start drying out, and as soon as a sketch is completed, the brush moves quickly on to one that has almost disappeared, trying to save it from falling into the abyss of oblivion." Haaretz

Oscar Muñoz / Re Trato

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