The piece that titles the new solo show of Mexican artist Ruben Ortiz, Retrospectiva en un minuto, is a one-minute video that covers thirty years of career and conceptually summarizes videos, pictures, installations, paintings, so spectators can admire the essences that have signed his evolution as an artist.
The artwork (his conception and temporal delimitation) is inspired, on the one hand, by the dynamics of modern life; and, on the other hand –and linked to the first one–, by the particular condition of the artist, who when facing promotional networks, curators, galleries and museums, is forced to do a tight synthesis of his work. That’s why the piece vertiginously merges over one thousand works with fragments of videos, full-length films, one opera, pictures, machines, paintings, sculptures, installations... The paradoxical is that, despite summarizing so much information, visitors feel an emptiness sensation, due to the overwhelming sequence: spectators are likely to feel themselves incapable of establishing immediate connections among all the elements, so as to correctly “read” the work.
Although this piece is not exactly a “retrospective”, the exhibition includes other works that enliven its revisionist character. Ortiz goes back to the past with drawings in which portraits of artists and friends, created during the 1980s, get blend with a recently-drawn second version, so they give evidence of the physical and psychological changes of the characters they represent.
There is another work that particularly attracts the attention … another two artworks, to be accurate. There is a couple of identical paintings, one is going to be sold as abstract painting, and the other one will try to provide new and different meanings, from the direct intervention of people and the environment. This project is part of a group of abstractions he has created in recent years, by using automotive industrial painting as material, and proposes certain questionings on the survival of painting as a genre, within a context where expressions like video and net art have gained momentum. On this matter, Ortiz has said:
“The fact that you go to a gallery and touch it [the painting], when the millennial code is ‘do not touch’, begins transgressing things. We are talking about a two-thousand- year-old expression, and we have spent fifty years thinking that it’s dead, but the painting has evolved in 100 years in a way that artists don’t understand, because it already has another function. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we use painting to protect, provide durability, to avoid radiation, but artists still take it in terms of representation... The painting here no longer communicates for what you see, but what you do: changes color when touched, with temperature...” (quote taken by La Jornada Digital)
Ortiz’ work has been marked by the hybridity of two cultures, Mexican and North American, specifically seen from the transborder phenomenon. The idea of the hybrid is a constant in his career, and is materialized in pieces that confront and merge different times and expressions.
OMR Gallery
Plaza Rio de Janeiro 54, Colonia Roma, Mexico DF
Sources: www.galeriaomr.com / La Jornada
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