The gap between the thing and its meaning has been Vik Muniz’s artistic concern from the beginning of his practice, when he drew famous photographs from memory, photographed the drawings, and exhibited the resulting images. With his new series, "Surfaces", he again subtracts the material element that differentiates a painting from a photograph and re-presents it, objectified by a layered image. Though these works utilize painting in both their process and concept, they are not paintings—yet as photographic images of works that exist in an autonomous, physical form, they are not abstractions either. This entropic negotiation of material loss and virtual gain pushes the viewer to question their relationship to the physical experience of an artwork, as images are so overwhelmingly mediated by the convenience and ubiquity of digital technology.
