New York, NY –– Whaam! Is pleased to present ​Pleasure Garden,​ the first solo exhibition by New York artist ​Sylvain Munoz​, opening on January 14 and on view through February 7, 2021. Made almost entirely during the 2020 city shutdown in the artist’s Chinatown studio, ​Pleasure Garden depicts a fictional world that is inhabited by all facets of Munoz’s imagination. It is a stage on which Heaven, Hell, and humanity mingle –– a modern, almost futuristic sin city, manifesting the pleasure of media consumption versus the evils of modern technology.

A self-taught artist born and raised in New York City, ​Munoz’s fantastical and painterly landscapes on canvas subvert the sexually charged in a playful, cartoon-like aesthetic, drawn from his nostalgic affinity with the 20th-century pop culture references he grew up with, from action figures to the 1993 ​video game Doom to the 1954 film ​Godzilla. ​While attending school in Greenwich Village, Munoz noticed the ​nearby sex shops and developed a deep fascination with New York’s BDSM and leather culture –– a curiosity that inspired his collecting of fetish magazines to create collages. a primary reference in the artist’s work. Many of Munoz’s paintings are cities within cities, micro snapshots that become part of his larger canvases, detailed in triptych-like compositions. ​A close look at his ​macrocosmic landscapes, reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s ​Garden of Earthly Delights​, reveals curious details and characters in intimate instances, in child-like depictions – threading escapism and confrontation, the familiar and the mysterious, the pleasurable and the morbid.