Muniz is renowned for his ingenious and laborious employment of unusual materials - dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, paper hole-punches, junk, dry pigment - to reconstruct images, often art historically related, that tap into the spectator’s subconscious visual repository and beg for further investigation. Muniz’s elaborate material creations - in this case the magazine collages - are ephemeral; it is his masterly photographic documentation that is the final work of art, which is intentionally many steps removed from the original image that inspired it.
Muniz simulates the brushstrokes of paintings such as Matisse's infamous Red Studio with scraps of art history books, carefully selected not only for their corresponding colour values but also their imagery - faces, body parts, text, advertisements - that collaged together suggest a tactile, impastoed surface. It is not just the final appropriated image that invites perusal, it is the minute components of the image - the bits of paper - that provide the irony, double meanings and visual associations for which Muniz is so well known.