MuuBlanco Log 29: Lieska Husband Sosa. Jacksonville, October 12, 2018 Bitácora 29, Jacksonville, October 12, 2018. Art is a necessity, art is freedom, art is what you want it to be (Abdel Hernández, Salon Pirelli, 1995) Muu Blanco. Chronology of irreverence Contemporaneity, a word as broad as the time it inhabits. I talk with Muu Blanco (José Antonio Blanco Angulo, Caracas 1966), a Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist with more than three decades in the field of art, in which his approach to contemporaneity —marked by irreverence and controversy— has been as vast as successful. His work is nourished by life experiences and important literary and artistic support; He is the great-grandson of Udon Pérez and the grandson of Antonio Angulo Luzardo, two illustrious marabinos whom he remembers as ...the ones to blame for my being in art... With an acid sense of humor, his stage name is a mockery of those who Once they made fun of him. And it has become his trademark, since Muu, DJ Muu or Dr. Muusica are a benchmark in the field of Venezuelan art of our time. I arrive on time for my appointment at his Miami studio, a vast laboratory of heightened creativity. He is a thoughtful, intuitive and sensitive man, within that great and robust humanity that maintains a ground wire in tune with what is happening around him, as well as a deep interest in what is happening in Venezuela. Lately, he develops a body of denunciation work, inviting the reflective gaze of the viewer; a visual and acoustic manifesto interpreted from the diaspora. But always from the landscape: explored, deconstructed, fragmented, manipulated in a variety of compositional techniques and disciplines. The landscape as the guiding axis and axiomatic resource in his creative process. The Landscape Abstractions series has become an investigation that has lasted more than fifteen years, whose homonymous theme originally explored the historiography of Venezuelan art from two recurrent themes: landscape and abstraction; reinterpreting the landscape from the perspective of perception and value as a subject of territorial planning. In his most recent work Urban Landscape, he incorporates aerial images of the neighborhoods of Caracas taken from the Internet, juxtaposed in a plot of organic abstraction in which, in an anguished compilation process, the artist wanted to convey the violation of society by overcrowding, by manipulation of a political discourse that reaches the most dispossessed. A critical stance against the communist regime that prevails in Venezuela. Ella, a mixmedia installation shown in 2017, brings together photography and 16 loudspeakers with Chavez's songs supporting his re-election. In the voice of the artist... the song of the destruction of Venezuela under state terrorism. The reading of a dark time in the history of the country. Poverty and prostitution, with a feminine image of consumption, on a bichrome landscape of ranches in different locations in the poverty belt that surrounds Caracas. In Sound Landscapes, Blanco translates superimposed sounds of the environment into “brushstrokes”, in a kind of auditory canvas, “coloring” with different effects such as frottage, rubbing, scraping, drilling, layers in addition or subtraction of volume, surrounding sounds... .They are the documentation of some sounds that mentally describe the context..., the artist defines. Far away is his participation in Salón Pirelli (1995) that would give him visibility as an emerging artist with Parliament, installation/disc play interpreting musical dialogues with his music-loving guests. An interactive piece, with spontaneous writings on the walls next to the cabin, which resulted in a giant graffiti by the viewer's action. Blanco worked for 10 years on Venezuelan radio and in 2002 he was considered someone interesting but without "academic work." His photographic, videographic and musical work did not seem to be enough for his legitimacy as an artist, until it was taken into account by his memorable bestiary as part of a series of collages and assemblages begun in 2000 called Anachronistic Modernism. The assemblages, ironically playful pieces, articulated under the aesthetics of waste, located outside of the everyday reality; dilapidated toys turned into amorphous beings born of unusual combinations. The collages, drawings of...layers and layers of nonsense things, a stain, a breast, a leg, a wave,... that over time have become pieces critical of the banality in the society in which they are unwraps. An archaeological exercise in which he destabilizes the uses of ordinary language through visual metaphor. The series NPC (2014) and NCTx13 Sample (2015), (New Compositional Thinking and New Compositional Thinking, respectively) bring together photographic work, intervention and musical performance. In the first, he photographs intervened images —with the Chapulin Colorado scapular, yellow heart included— of the magazine Extra Cámara edition no. 13, referring to the "glorious" Venezuelan oil past and alluding to the belief in patriotic saviors, from the Omnipresent God to the TV character. The second, an intervention photographed on the pages of Retromundo —Paolo Gasparini's photobook— in which he unravels colorful pills in a subtle insinuation of the presumption of the use of pills as a panacea for resolving life situations. This Chronology of Irreverence —incomplete— has become a low flight through 30 years of creative reflection, full of intelligent criticism and irony. Some series such as Abstract Violence or Landscape in Time denote a careful aesthetic based on violence in different fields of life (sports and urban). He recently works on frozen video images taken as a photograph, projected on his face, which record the attack on a citizen with pellets in the face, in recent protests. I put these images of suffering on my skin, like Jesus on the cross... Muu Blanco develops various projects in different areas in parallel. At the same time he can be exhibiting, while presenting a performance. His presence in private and institutional collections, as well as in individual and collective exhibitions in Caracas, New York, Berlin, Barcelona, ​​Bogotá, Miami or Rio de Janeiro, show the relevance of his work, also reviewed in different international publications. Collage, drawing, painting, assemblage, digital photography, installation, video mapping, sound, are part of the broad support of a consistent work, not complacent with aesthetic paradigms and using appropriations that enrich its discursive line. The artist insists that his creative process is simple, sometimes the product of fortuitous situations that feed his inexhaustible creativity. He calls himself an “idea producer”. His work is dense, full of nuances and opposing discourses, readings and inferences. A kind of fragments of collective memory, assembled in visual and sound interpretation. A challenge for the viewer of these times who is no longer satisfied with being a recipient of aesthetic enjoyment, but rather wishes to take an active part in the work. Muu Blanco's interactive proposals induce him to do so. Lieska Husband Sosa. Art researcher José Antonio (Muu) Blanco. Instagram: @muublanco @muublancoangulo @muublancovideoart @abstraccionespaisajisticas @drmuusica