David Munoz, an artist with a scientific background (ENSCT), relies on scientific methods and tools to create the shapes he needs for his visual creations.

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With a resolute focus on contemporary issues, from ecology to new technologies, he uses images to create narratives that question the spectator's certainties, drawing on the fields of philosophy, anthropology and psychology.

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Landscapes, whatever they may be, seem filled with mysteries that, if we begin to unravel them, speak to us of the impact of human activity on its environment. It's an image of the Anthropocene, humanity's impact on the earth's ecosystem, a notion that David Munoz explores throughout his work.

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At the same time as this impact has been accelerating, we have been distancing ourselves from nature. Concrete has taken the place of topsoil under the feet of an increasingly urbanized humanity, and little by little the link to the land has been extinguished, or at least to that land, which is breathing ever more heavily. As a result, our apprehension of the world has changed, our perspectives have inverted - perhaps - and our relationship with the environment has inevitably been impoverished. This is what the Universum project is all about, this paradigm shift that in many ways defines our contemporaneity.

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To make visible to the public this zone of uncertainty that constitutes our relationship with reality, David Munoz goes out into the field. Accompanied by a guide, he wanders the terrain, carrying his equipment and capturing images. But then again, I'm blind, because not all the photographs around me are the result of his peregrinations.

On the contrary, some are entirely computer-generated - artificial, in other words, and yet perfectly natural, in a sense. To construct these images - for they are indeed a construction - David Munoz uses generative processes: fragmented, the image is in fact created by the proliferation of infinitely smaller elements which - when assembled - seem to form this necessary whole, as if perfectly natural. There's a clash between the natural and the virtual, between perception and reality, which once again questions our relationship with the world and the environment.

In partnership with the ENS Paris-Saclay, David Munoz is transposing these questions to the field of sculpture. Accompanied by scientists in mechanical engineering, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, he is working on the movement of glaciers, questioning our intimate and sensitive relationship with environmental emergency. Here again, it's a question of movement, tension and perception of reality. 

Recently, he has also been exploring these issues in video projects, such as Une impression de dé-réalité, a work co-created with artist Camille Sauer.

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In the end, whether David Munoz's work takes the form of photography, multimedia installation, video or sculpture, it's always the same tension at work, the same confusion in the face of an ambiguous space. A zone of uncertainty that questions our own convictions and, by testing our belief systems, sets us in motion.

At last! We're alive...

Grégoire Prangé
Curatorial coordinator, LaM