Jaime Munõz

Jaime Muñoz is a draftsman and painter based in Pomona, California. Born in Los Angeles his practice centers on the intersection of mechanization and American labor. His work explores the interplay between commodity culture, consumerism, and belief systems rooted in capitalism and religion. Muñoz’s imagery unfolds in a patchwork fashion, weaving together the visual language of Southern California with iconographies drawn from popular culture and labor history. These references span from antiquity and the American Industrial Revolution to contemporary pickup trucks, tools of modern industry, 20th-century labor movements, and parables found in fantasy and science fiction.

At the center of Muñoz’s practice is a dialogue between religion, technology, and the systems that shape modern life. His paintings function as indexes of industrialization and manufactured beliefs. Within this framework, modern capitalism and consumer culture are understood as systems of faith, reflecting modes of devotion, spectacle, and moral instruction akin to those found in Latin American Baroque painting. Just as Baroque imagery mobilized excess, reverence, and persuasion to shape belief, contemporary commodities and technologies operate through similar mechanisms, organizing desire, labor, and loyalty.

Muñoz incorporates text as a symbolic element in his work, often constructing dimensional lettering and, more recently, employing a stylized engraved typeface known as Academy Engraved. Informed by his background in construction, and graphic design, his process emphasizes careful planning and a hybrid approach to analog and digital drawing, drawing influence from blueprint drafting and traditional silkscreening. The result is a pictorial language in which technique and subject matter mirror one another - the handmade precision reflecting the human capacity to conceal labor through craft.

Muñoz’s work has gained significant visibility through exhibitions such as At the Edge of The Sun at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles. Solo exhibition at François Ghebaly, New York. The Pacific Standard Time initiative How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney’s Latin America & Latin America’s Disney, Nina Chanel Abney’s Punch LA at Jeffrey Deitch, and his solo presentation in Focus LA at Frieze Los Angeles. His first solo museum exhibition, Truth is a Moving Target at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, further solidified his position as a key voice examining labor, technology, and cultural identity in contemporary painting.

Muñoz’s work has been featured in LA Times, KCET Artbound, Art of Choice, Hyperallergic, and Juxtapoz, among others. Throughout, Muñoz creates a space where the sociopolitical and the personal converge - where working-class tools, ancestral memory, and everyday objects become social symbols, transformation, and the ongoing tension between human life and the machinizations that shapes it.