Probably not coincidentally, the craze for zombies and vampires is congruent with the phenomenon of the retrieval and revival of past styles. The old saw “when you’re dead you’re dead” doesn’t hold true anymore for artists expressing themselves abstractly in languages that were once used to very different ends. Abstraction is a language primed for becoming a representation of itself, because as much as it resists attributions of narrative, it cannot help but carry with it the entire utopian history of modern painting. Colombian-born, London-based Oscar Murillo often treats his expressionist marks as bits of iconography. His gestures function in a similar way to the words that he also often incorporates into his compositions; they can be “read” as signs, in the literal sense of the kind of unmediated personal expression exemplified by postwar modernist painters.