Murillo’s work looks beyond any form of identity politics but is nevertheless channelled through his own biography and the history of his family and ancestry. Dealing with mercantile histories and the present worldwide realities they continue to shape, and with themes of migration and the global exchange of people and goods, questions of class and precarity in our globalized capitalist system resonate with increasing intensity in his work.

In a practice that encompasses performance, video, installation and painting, Murillo establishes “a porous border between the studio and the real world” (Okwui Enwezor) where “Murillo’s lifelong preoccupations — migration, trade, capital, family, settlement — mean that his work veritably vibrates with globalisation-anxiety” (Kritika Varagur).

In Murillo's work, the process of generative labour and accumulation serves as a conceptual framework for the collected images and references. “The sheer force of his expressionist gestures also suggests manual labor, the honest work done by paid laborers, as opposed to the speculative tinkering of the artist in the studio. Here Murillo is restoring to the individual gesture the potential political charge that mid-century American critics worked so hard to deny, as they made artists apolitical and converted Abstract Expressionism into a realm of pure aesthetics. Still, the dialectics driving the existential strain of action painting underpin even Murillo’s purportedly atemporal manoeuvres. This is clear in his description of Catalyst (2019), a work he created by placing an unstretched painted canvas on the floor, painted side down, on top of another one, and pressing on the back of the top canvas with a stick so that the impression of his marks is left on both. ‘I call it Catalyst,’ he says, ‘because it is about action, and reaction’” (Peter Benson Miller).

Murillo’s flight # drawings, which offer a record of the time that the artist has spent in transit. These ballpoint-pen drawings bring to mind a multilayered stream of consciousness, a complex chain of thoughts and information that records and documents the artist’s thought processes. Flying, which ensures a physical distance from the ground, creates a crack in time. However, since flight routes are determined by political landscapes thousands of metres below (national borders, travel and trade routes, etc.), the dynamics of flying are inextricably linked to the laws of the ground. Nevertheless, flight offers the artist the opportunity to observe current social conditions through a more horizontal and abstract lens. Alongside the flight # drawings, the exhibition showcases video works that address questions of mobility and explore the perpetual state of flux embodied in the drawings.

– From the exhibition text for Horizontal Darkness in Search of Solidarity, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, 2019