Series of paintings produced between 2019 and 2020
Welcome to Rosa, a booth named after a sex shop in Tijuana. Mauricio Muñoz describes it as the agora of love. For the artist, this space is not merely the memory of a storefront from his hometown, but a spatial pretext that summons a constellation of images charged with desire, consumption, and fantasy, images that shaped his upbringing. Here, the unspoken is taken for granted, and actions and forms of language unfold from an unapologetically embraced metaphysics. There is no time or space for idle curiosity. You know what you have come for, even if you are not fully aware of it. Curious to look? Then go and look.
Before us, Muñoz presents a booth, perhaps one you recognize, perhaps not, equipped with a peephole. Looking through it, viewers encounter an animation composed from the artist's oil paintings. The sequence draws on the saturated, explicit, and exaggerated visual language of the sexual advertisements that for years circulated through newspapers, magazines, and even public urban spaces. Populated by robust, overflowing bodies, the work reclaims figures long excluded from normative representations of desire, returning to view a popular visual culture that had always been there, though often overlooked.
Rather than simply offering or withholding pleasure, these images confront us as spectators who are also consumers. In Destroying Sexuality (1973), Guy Hocquenghem argued that capitalism shapes our very notions of freedom and desire, infiltrating even those sexual experiences that appear to exist outside its rules. From the marital bed to the brothel, from public bathrooms to the sex shop and the viewing booth, sexuality ultimately becomes organized through official models that promise liberation while producing frustration, scarcity, and perpetual demand. Desire thus circulates as yet another form of consumption, and bodies remain trapped within the very structures that claim to set them free. Muñoz revisits these images to expose precisely this machinery, revealing how certain sexual imaginaries continue to shape the ways we look, desire, and relate to the body.
Painting functions here as a point of departure for constructing a dispositif in which digital animation, the viewing booth, and the aesthetics of the sex shop confront the visual canons that continue to determine how we see and desire. Rosa thus becomes a site from which to dismantle and push back against received ideas of pleasure, sexuality, and its representations, inviting us to rediscover our relationship with the living body.