Entropy and Friendship: Luis Muñoz’s Curatorship in ‘Fruit of the Doom’

Every time I walk into the building that once housed the Electricians’ Union —in Mexico City’s Juárez neighborhood, now home to Luzy and other projects such as Relaciones Públicas gallery— I think of Elba Esther Gordillo, the Second International, and Jacques Derrida. I am crossed by ghosts born of collective daydreams. This time I went to the gallery’s exhibitions, among them Fruit of the Doom, which confirms that there are still spaces where one can feel respect and awe before objects.

Fruit of the Doom brings together painters Luis Diego Abril, Maggie Chavarri, Chelsea Culprit, Matero Miranda, Ileana Moreno, Andy Punk, and sculptor Emanuel Juárez. The show feels as though something has exploded and we remain inside its expanding wave. The brushstrokes, the arrangement of elements, and the worn textures of color produce a material sensation of entropy: as if the blast had not destroyed but rearranged fragments into a new visual logic. The result is perpetual motion, a dynamism that forces the viewer’s gaze into restless movement—as if each work, beyond its representations, embodied erosion, repetition, and temporal indifference.

Despite this visual core, I was intrigued by the impulse to bring such works together. My thoughts turned to the curator: Luis Muñoz, a.k.a. The New Doctor, who is also an artist and writer. I first met him in 2014, when he was the teenager with a backpack attending every opening, always carrying a notebook where he compulsively drew affective maps of the city. Years later, his curatorial intuitions came to light in Mexico City (he had previously run a gallery in Guadalajara) with his piece Breve ensayo sobre la decadencia de la contracultura [Brief Essay on the Decadence of Counterculture] (2023), shown in El fin de lo maravilloso: Cyberpop en México [The End of the Marvelous: Cyberpop in Mexico] —curated by Karol Wolley at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. There, he made clear that for him, curatorship and art form a conceptual network shaped by personal narrative as well as the forces of the global market.

When not guided by a theme, group exhibitions bear the mark of the ungovernable. The work of synthesis that eye and reason must undertake to form a mental image of what is displayed is monumental, if not impossible. I confess that upon hearing of Fruit of the Doom I expected to see more of the “stoner formalism,” as The New Doctor calls it, or the “dripping formalism,” as I named it: “a soft derivative of forms that soothe the psyche,” in Byung-Chul Han’s words. But instead, what appeared was post-identity painting dreaming of Guadalajara or haunted by the ghost of the Bajío. The same flow that structures daily life also shapes aesthetics: interrupted conversations, shared images, digital textures, and projects assembled from scraps of time. The paintings embody the contemporaneity of communication: multiple elements adrift in a teleology-free nebula. Perhaps that is Muñoz’s eye: perpetual mobility, a painting that refuses to settle into a stable image, instead embodying acceleration, anxiety, and the desire to move on.

The exhibition opens with an epigraph by Lyman Zerga: “Let curating not get in the way of art.” Not long ago, the hottest thing was to be a curator: curating became the locus of enunciation amid market excess and uncertainty. As Georges Perec wrote —unintentionally sketching a curatorial method—: think, classify. Today that fever has cooled. Everyone still curates, yes, but it is no longer hot. It is done out of inertia, whim, or desire.

In Fruit of the Doom, curatorship appears as a minimal, almost denied gesture, seeking a return to the plain purity of art. Its central argument is nothing more than friendship and chance. Muñoz himself admits in his text: “the guiding threads of this exhibition are a series of phone calls, WhatsApp conversations, walks, repairs after rain… and the elastic of a supermarket pair of underwear.”

With this, Luis suggests that curating is “the friends we make along the way,” not merely a proto-discipline complicit with globalization. Fruit of the Doom refreshes our gaze by refusing the order constantly demanded of curating: to systematize, to unveil, to produce an erudite statement, to enlighten us. And yet, as with any negation, it remains inscribed within what it rejects: anti-curating is still another form of curating, another way of negotiating the logics of prestige circulation. What it leaves behind is the honesty of cultural logic, affection, and homeland, while exposing us to what we are no longer accustomed to: dissimilar, striking objects we must face in their singularity, without an algorithm to arrange them or a statement to soothe us.

Muñoz’s curating refuses to deliver a pre-digested exhibition: it rejects the idea that to curate is to interpret. On the contrary, by withholding synthesis, the show calls us to shift how we experience art. Here entropy unsettles the desire for order —the glances that confirm statements— and returns us to a moment that Muñoz perhaps longs for: “art beyond market logic,” “art as a wager for shared sensibility,” “art without mediation.” It carried me there; I confess it had been a while since I was led to knowledge by an exhibition. And perhaps that is why this text does not seek to add brilliance or erudition, but simply to affirm that there are still ways of producing strangeness and sensitivity through uncodified objects—a success and a relief within today’s cultural map of content saturation.

— M. S. Yániz

Translated to English by Luis Sokol