Singularities
From bordering spaces to colonial encounters
Renzo Ortega talks about culture as a container. As everything is packed, we are only able to see the outside, with all its visual appeal (like in a marketplace). But what is contained / constrained within? That is what matters to Ortega. As a contemporary painter, Ortega studies the history of art and the grammar of the visual to account for the fragmentation of space and time in contemporary societies. Ortega is also a performer, musician (of techno cumbia and punk rock), and installation artist. Nonetheless, he considers himself a conventional painter, one that had the privilege of studying at important art schools.xi At the same time, Ortega feels dislocated and anachronistic as a creator. Indeed, he is not a conventional artist, he is a cerebral painter, with a monastic discipline and attention to detail, in both form and content.
Ortega invites the viewer to immerse in visual narratives. His work is reflexive, at times bringing his multicultural origin and his story of migration to the U.S. In his Mestizaje (2019) Ortega not only goes to the cradle (literally), depicting a conqueror father and an indigenous mother, they are married (look at the rings defying preconceived ideas), with two babies, one holds a sacred coca leaf and points outside of the frame, the other sleeps under the tutelage of a sacred mountain (Apu). The front piece of the cradle shows a map of the United States, while a bull (the symbol of Durham) is at the fore of the image. On the left, an afro-angel carries a stone home, while a parade of youth march playing music. It is like reading a baroque painting, where the iconography defies gender roles, and criticizes the hypermasculine idea of European culture in the Americas. In Ortega’s large and small paintings, different elements of 1950s abstraction, past and contemporary images coalesced. He highlights the cultural differences and similarities, a constant negotiation on the constitution of the self, which materialized in the multilayer depictions that defy perspective and grounding (as all floats before the eyes). His work oscillates on cultural identity, art history, material culture, hi and lo art, what is contained in the frame, and what escapes it. In Vida (2019), a primal environment in green, yellow, and blue, holds several layers where fragmented indigenous images and constructive spaces (that recall Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist work) float.
A ghost tree at the center of the frame ties all elements together. On the lower right, a womb shows a fetus in which the umbilical cord is also a tree, and a drum-like figure balances the composition on the lower left. In front of the tree, corn (maíz) takes center stage giving sense to the title. King corn is at the base of indigenous cosmovision in the Americas, and it is at the center of the food supply across the continent (the U.S. is the largest producer of corn in the world); past and present it rules. Where does this image take place? The northern cardinal perched in the tree announces the place of encounter, North Carolina.
Miguel Rojas Sotelo, Ph.D.
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina. March 20, 2023