Antonio Muñiz was born and raised in Chihuahua, México. From an early age, I came to understand that life was rather rigid, defined by boundaries and expectations which did not fit my natural instincts. My first ever painting was at nine years old, of a room with four walls in the house of my mother. 

In 1996 I graduated with a BA from San Diego’s New School of Architecture in an attempt to find expression and freedom in my life. My architectural background allowed me to explore space and living from a more organic, creative, and free-form perspective. Further exploring the physical bounds of my expressiveness, I found that painting allowed me to expand my creative vision further outside formal walls. 

In ‘06 I was introduced to Rodrigo Pimentel, a Mexican post-war & contemporary painter. I was drawn to our akin personalities and our ritualistic conversations and began working with him as my mentor. Pimentel taught me how to read art and bare my own chest in its process. He taught me how a line didn’t have to be just a straight line, but could be a matrix of organic shapes with a definitive start and end point. Pimentel cracked open my imagination to the abstract, to unconscious automatism, and subconscious expression. 

Including Pimentel, I was most influenced by the work of Roberto Matta, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, and Albert Oehlen. Particularly-Mattas’ biomorphic shapes that occasionally cohere into representational forms, Varo’s infusion of philosophic inquiry through mystical and visionary landscapes, Tanning’s meticulously rendered figurative dreamscapes that transcended reality, and Oehlen’s commitment to rigorous formalism and abstract delicacy.

While studying the Surrealists I discovered the technique of “fumage”, now a fundamental pillar in my work. I’m fascinated by the smoke’s ability to mutate forms, and its unpredictable urgency for freedom. I feel deeply akin and attracted to how the smoke’s movement inhabits a canvas. Its autonomic application serves as a compositional skeleton for my work while the ritualistic action of burning cleanses, burning away bad habits, ingrained behaviors, and linear thinking, ultimately encouraging flexibility and deeply reflective expression.

Using Fumage as my compositional base, I use movement and color to produce multidimensional energy. As each of these layers integrate, they introduce new information and perspectives, producing limitless realities and unity within each of my abstract terrains. These layers of space become a process of opening portals and world building. Every completed painting represents an exciting energetic interpretation of movement simultaneously connecting past, present, and future.

Aspiring to reveal the metaphysical through the surrealist methodology of fumage and automatism, my work is an abstract amalgamation of color, movement, and space, as fluid and as boundless as fire and smoke itself.