The last time we saw Maya Munoz she gave us bleak landscapes, infinite horizons of black and white and gray. These days, as she
muses on the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, she injects something different. She surrounds her paintings of singular figures with a joyous palette: backgrounds in vivid purple and ocean blues, splashes of rouge and yellow, blossoms in mandarin and fuchsia. But don’t take that to mean that Maya’s work has resorted to triteness, to illustrating love through sunshine and flowers. At the foreground of her pieces, she depicts her figures in silhouettes, dark shadows that portend sad endings. Every great romance culminates in tragedy after all. Nothing illustrates this more than the tale of Orpheus, Apollo’s son, who braves the underworld to bring his Eurydice back to light, only to lose her forever with a glance.
The Romanticist by Maya Munoz runs from 29 August to 19 September 2009 at The Drawing Room, 1007 Metropolitan Avenue, Makati City. Phone (632)897-7877 or visit http://www.drawingroomgallery.com