Time, for most of us, moves in a straight line: past, present, future—each moment neatly filed away behind the next. For Oscar Murillo, it’s more like a knot. His canvases, installations, and gestures fold years into seconds, blur geographies, and collapse personal memory into collective history. In an age obsessed with progress and productivity, Murillo has been steadily assembling a body of work that refuses to behave, pushing back against the tidy comfort of linear narrative. As he reflects on his practice, what emerges is less a career arc than a living constellation: fragments of labor and language, migration and ritual, recombined each time a viewer steps into the room.
Understanding nonlinear time in Oscar Murillo’s evolving practice
For Murillo, time behaves less like a straight road and more like a tangled thread that keeps knotting and unknotting itself. His canvases, films and social projects are not isolated moments but overlapping intervals, where gestures made years ago reappear as echoes in new works. Instead of treating earlier pieces as finished chapters, he folds them back into the present, stitching fragments from past exhibitions, studio experiments and travels into fresh constellations. The studio becomes an ever-expanding archive in motion, where dust, fabric scraps and half-erased marks act as temporal residues rather than waste.
- Old works re-enter the process as live material, not relics.
- Travel and displacement are treated as cyclical returns, not departures.
- Collaboration with communities injects multiple, conflicting clocks into a single project.
| Time Mode | Murillo’s Approach |
|---|---|
| Chronological | Disrupted, reordered, spliced |
| Personal Memory | Materialized as stains, folds, scars |
| Historical Time | Compressed into symbolic gestures |
This refusal of a single, forward-facing timeline allows contradictions to remain visible on the surface of his work. Layers of paint and dirt coexist with bureaucratic documents, classroom drawings or airline blankets, as if different eras of globalization were pressed into the same skin. The result is not a clean narrative arc but a palimpsest, where each new intervention only partially overwrites what came before. Viewers encounter these accumulations as a kind of temporal dissonance: the feeling that they are seeing something both emerging and already worn, still in process yet somehow aged.
Such an approach unsettles the usual expectations of artistic “progress,” where each exhibition is supposed to replace the last. Instead, Murillo builds a practice in which works re-circulate across continents, reinstalled, reconfigured and sometimes literally cut apart and sewn into new supports. A painting shown in London may resurface in Bogotá as a fragment inside a larger field of marks, its previous context only faintly legible. In this sense, his oeuvre behaves like a migratory network of objects and ideas—rhythmic, recursive and resistant to closure—mirroring the unstable, looping experiences of labor, migration and cultural identity that underlie his broader concerns.
Archives in motion How Murillo’s recurring motifs disrupt beginnings and endings
Across canvases, videos and installations, Murillo’s repeated symbols behave less like static references and more like traveling messengers. A scrawled word that first appeared on a studio wall re-emerges years later on a stitched banner, then slips into a performance script or a school notebook, refusing to stay put. These echoes create an elastic sense of time: the past never fully recedes, the present arrives already annotated, and the future is seeded with images we’ve seen before but can’t quite locate. In this restless circulation, the studio becomes an engine of recurrence, where marks are not finished gestures but provisional pauses in a much longer movement.
- Reused phrases that migrate from painting to video
- Recycled fabrics carrying stains of previous works
- Circulating notebooks written by students in multiple countries
- Fragmented maps that appear, vanish and reconfigure elsewhere
Because these motifs refuse to inaugurate or conclude anything, they undermine the comfort of clear-cut art-historical periods or neatly framed “series.” The work does not build toward a climax; it drifts sideways, doubles back, or skips ahead, inventing a rhythm closer to migration than to progress. Murillo’s visual vocabulary behaves like an unsettled archive in perpetual rehearsal, where the same element can be a relic, a prophecy and a present-tense fact all at once. In this unstable field, the viewer is not offered a single entry or exit point, but a dense mesh of returns, ruptures and continuities that keeps the experience of time open, provisional and insistently unfinished.
| Motif | First Encounter | Later Return |
|---|---|---|
| Loose thread | Edge of a canvas | Center of a textile map |
| School desk mark | Classroom project | Large-scale wall drawing |
| Flight path line | Notebook margin | Overlaid on crowded group scenes |
Material as memory The role of texture, repetition and scale in resisting linear narratives
For Murillo, canvas is less a surface than a repository—fibers thick with dust, travel, and touch. Texture operates like sedimented time: stitched scraps, hardened paint, and smeared graphite hold the residue of earlier gestures that refuse to disappear under the new. Each mark is a palimpsest, turning the work into a kind of document that can’t be cleanly dated because the past remains physically present. What emerges is not an image that illustrates memory, but a material field that behaves like memory: unstable, layered, and resistant to being filed away chronologically.
- Texture accumulates like scars, testifying to prior actions.
- Repetition recycles motifs until they feel ritualistic rather than sequential.
- Scale overwhelms the body, making time feel spatial and ambient.
Across the studio, recurring words, stains, and patterns appear like recurring dreams, disrupting any expectation of a neat before-and-after. The same sign surfaces on a small work on paper and a sprawling canvas, then reappears in a collaborative textile, as if it’s migrating rather than progressing. By shifting the size and context of these elements, Murillo dislocates them from a single moment and anchors them instead in a broader circulation of experience. The works form a network of resonances that can be entered anywhere, suggesting that meaning doesn’t unfold along a straight line but gathers in overlapping loops, where each return is both a reminder and a revision.
| Element | Function in the Work | Effect on Time |
|---|---|---|
| Rough surfaces | Trap traces of labor and travel | Makes the past tactile |
| Recurring symbols | Move across mediums and series | Collapse earlier and later |
| Monumental formats | Engulf the viewer’s field of vision | Turn duration into physical immersion |
Studio as constellation Building a dispersed practice across geographies and communities
For Murillo, the notion of studio dissolves the moment it is fixed to an address. What emerges instead is a scattered topology of making: canvases rolled and unrolled across continents, conversations that turn into sketches, gestures that migrate from one city’s dust and noise to another’s quiet edge. This fragmented infrastructure behaves like a night sky of work zones—some formal, some improvised—each point illuminating the others through shared rhythms of labor, memory and interruption. The result is a practice that doesn’t simply travel; it mutates, absorbing the textures of airports, kitchens, community halls and industrial warehouses into a porous field of ongoing experimentation.
Within this expanded field, collaboration stops being an event and becomes a condition. Murillo folds people and places into his process as co-authors rather than spectators, weaving together:
- Local rituals that infiltrate the surface of paintings and installations.
- Community workshops that generate drawings, notes and gestures feeding larger works.
- Shared meals and gatherings that double as research, rehearsal and archive-building.
- Returning visits to the same sites, where change over time becomes material in itself.
Each encounter leaves a residue—a phrase, a stain, a political tension—that is not neatly resolved but kept in circulation, complicating any singular narrative of origin or authorship.
| Place | Type of Node | Material Trace |
|---|---|---|
| London | Industrial studio | Paint, dust, freight labels |
| La Paila | Family home | Soil, voices, school notebooks |
| Airports | Transient corridor | Boarding passes, delays, fatigue |
| Community centers | Social laboratory | Collective drawings, slogans |
Across these dispersed nodes, time folds rather than progresses. Works begun in one geography are suspended and reactivated elsewhere, layered with new marks that do not overwrite the old but coexist with them. Murillo’s practice becomes a web of unfinished conversations, where painting, performance and installation act as carriers for dislocated memories and shared urgencies. In this meshwork, the studio is less a stable refuge than an evolving choreography of movement, return and reconfiguration—an infrastructure that mirrors the fractured, overlapping temporalities of migration, labor and global exchange.
Reading against the clock How viewers can engage with Murillo’s work beyond chronological order
To enter Murillo’s universe is to accept that paintings, videos and documents do not line up like calendar events but collide like memories. Viewers can move laterally instead of forward, following a smear of pigment from one canvas to a stitched banner, or tracing a recurring fragment of handwriting as it migrates across mediums. In this way, the work becomes a kind of visual archive where cause and effect are blurred, and the eye is encouraged to wander, loop back and cross-reference, rather than obediently proceed from “early” to “late.” Time begins to feel less like a straight road than an intersection where different experiences constantly meet.
- Start with a detail—a mark, word or fabric scrap—and hunt for its echoes elsewhere.
- Reverse your route: visit the newest works first, then walk backward into earlier rooms.
- Ignore labels at first, letting intuition guide your path before consulting dates and titles.
- Pair distant pieces in your mind, as if you were curating your own mini-exhibition.
| Linear Viewing | Nonlinear Viewing |
|---|---|
| Follows dates and periods | Follows threads and motifs |
| Seeks progression and “maturity” | Seeks rhythm and recurrence |
| Answers “what came next?” | Asks “what returns, and why?” |
| One-way narrative | Network of overlapping stories |
By treating the gallery as a field rather than a timeline, audiences can experience Murillo’s practice as an active process instead of a completed sequence. Works separated by years begin to converse: a scuffed school desk might speak to an abstract canvas; an industrial fabric to a grainy video of travel. This mode of looking acknowledges that the artist’s concerns—migration, labor, displacement, language—do not politely queue up in a single file but recur, mutate and double back. In reading the pieces “out of order,” viewers mirror the very resistance to linear time that underpins the work itself, discovering meaning in repetition, interruption and return.
Curating temporal complexity Strategies for museums to present Murillo without flattening time
To do justice to Murillo’s refusal of neat chronology, exhibition design has to move beyond the conventional march from “early” to “late” work. Instead of leading visitors through a hallway of dates, curators can choreograph a space where paintings, video, and documents coexist like overlapping radio frequencies. Walls might juxtapose works created a decade apart, while labels resist timestamping every object and instead foreground recurring motifs—migration, labor, collective memory—that thread through the artist’s practice. In this way, the gallery becomes less a timeline and more a live diagram of how ideas recur, mutate, and return.
- Layer wall texts to reveal competing narratives rather than a single authoritative story.
- Use soundscapes that fade in and out, echoing the way memories interrupt the present.
- Rotate works mid-run so that the exhibition itself behaves like a shifting archive.
- Invite community annotations that accumulate over time and remain visible as part of the display.
| Curatorial Move | Temporal Effect |
|---|---|
| Non-linear room sequence | Visitors loop, backtrack, and revisit moments. |
| Mixed-date clusters | Past and present collide on a single wall. |
| Process materials on view | Shows works as ongoing, not “finished.” |
| Live, time-based events | Exhibition evolves as a shared performance. |
Digital tools can intensify this refusal of linearity without turning the show into a tech spectacle. Interactive screens might allow visitors to map connections between works across years and continents, revealing dense constellations rather than progress charts. Short video fragments of the artist at work, community gatherings, or factory floors can be embedded among the paintings like temporal glitches, puncturing any illusion of a sealed-off art-historical moment. By weaving together archival traces, collaborative projects, and large-scale canvases in a constantly cross-referential field, museums can let Murillo’s practice unfold as a lived, unsettled present that is always haunted by what has already happened and what has yet to arrive.
Collecting for the long now Recommendations for collectors embracing open ended bodies of work
For collectors drawn to Murillo’s refusal of tidy beginnings and endings, the challenge is to think less like an archivist of finished objects and more like a custodian of evolving propositions. This means prioritizing works that carry traces of previous gestures—overpainting, stitching, erasure, reconfiguration—so that what you acquire is not a static moment but a living stratum within a larger sediment of practice. Instead of asking, “Is this the definitive piece?” the more resonant question becomes, “How might this work continue to reverberate as the artist’s language mutates?”
- Seek continuity, not completion – Favor series, families of works and iterative experiments over singular trophies.
- Value processual marks – Scratches, seams, and scars are evidence of time, not flaws to be minimized.
- Embrace partial narratives – Let gaps, contradictions, and unresolved motifs remain intact rather than demanding clear resolutions.
- Document context generously – Archive studio notes, installation views, and correspondence to keep the work tethered to its shifting environment.
| Collector Approach | Time Horizon | Desired Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Object-as-endpoint | Short, market-driven | Clarity, finality |
| Object-as-chapter | Long, open-ended | Ambiguity, evolution |
Aligning with this second approach entails making room—physically and conceptually—for works to shift meaning over decades. Installations might be rehung to foreground different relationships, groups of paintings rotated so that patterns of migration, labor, or language emerge slowly over time. Collectors willing to let their holdings behave like an unfinished sentence—inviting future works, new research, and changing political conditions to rewrite the emphasis—will find themselves not simply owning Murillo’s work, but actively participating in its ongoing calibration of what art can do with time itself.
Final Thoughts
In the end, Murillo’s practice reminds us that time is not a straight line but a field of overlapping echoes—personal, political, geographic. His canvases and actions do not seek to resolve history into a neat narrative; they insist instead on its constant return, its unfinished arguments, its stubborn stains.
To follow his work is to accept that meaning arrives in fragments: a recurring motif, a scuffed surface, a word half-erased but still legible. It is to recognize that art can hold multiple temporalities at once—the urgency of the present, the weight of the past, and the uncertainty of what has yet to unfold.
By refusing linear time, Murillo does not step outside of history so much as press more deeply into it. The result is a body of work that feels less like a sequence of milestones and more like a living archive—restless, provisional, and always in the process of becoming.
