ADVANTAGE MUÑOZ

An Exhibition by Artist and Athlete

VICENTE MUÑOZ

There are certain things you can only truly understand by doing. The perspective of a spectator will always be from the outside, gazing into those who live in the box. Tennis courts are made up of boxes within boxes, with intersecting lines, scored by points, inside of games, inside of sets, summed up into matches. To stand on that baseline is to feel and to know. The intimacy of the sport is complicated, personal, painful, and poetic. Alone you stand as you face your opponent, separated only by a wall of woven netting tied taut. The length of each match lasting up to 3 hours or more at any given time depending on the circumstances. Tennis is a monotonous game full of back and forth swaying movements of swift and consistent ups and downs that mimic life itself. Perhaps this is why the game is so attractive. To practice the artform gives you a way of looking at the world of tennis that cannot be learned otherwise, an advantage.

Artist and athlete Vicente Muñoz has this advantage. At the budding age of 9 he started to swing a racquet. By 14, he began competing and hasn't stopped practicing the artform since. Tournament after tournament, match after match, the consistent exposure to the complicated yet somehow simple rollercoaster of emotional knots that tennis provides has conditioned Vicente to approach tennis through a more intimate lens when photographing the sport. Through the use of indexing movement, attention to overlooked details, colorplay, and curiously questioning what a tennis photograph is, this body of work aims at advancing the status quo of tennis photography which is usually reliant on surface level tennis courts placed into beautiful landscapes to do the heavy lifting.

This collection of work ranges from within his over 16 years of photographing and creating tennis related pieces. The work is a visual diary entry of love, loss, experience, and an understanding of the simple everyday moments of the game and continued journey as an athlete and artist within it.

Curatorial Direction by Brendan Carroll of SporArts.

THE OFFICE.

@sporarts @vicente.munoz