artnexus #59

Damián Ortega (Mexico City, 1967; lives and works in that city) has been characterized by his development of unsettling works of art. He questions objects and their predictable functions, and his works give these objects, or the living beings he also incorporates, a role that decontextualizes their use, their functions, and the environment in which we normally place them. Perhaps his background as a political cartoonist influences the ironic, transgressive attitude on which he builds his proposals. From his prints, América nuevo orden (1996), his Módulo de construcción con tortillas (1998), and his 120 variations of the traditional Coca-Cola bottle produced on the basis of his designs by glass-making artisans, what has become evident is his interest in showing how the alteration of form determines a change, not only in the function but in the meaning of everyday objects. The choice of elements, the situations that are created, and the multitude of possible readings do not allow viewers to remain indifferent, provoking many approaches where there is no room for indifference.

Habitually, man wants to control the space that surrounds him, and nature as well, losing sight of the latter’s ability to shape and mold the individual. Reglas e instintos (Rules and Instincts) belong to Ortega’s peculiar, irreverent relationship with his surroundings. In the neutral space of the gallery, he placed an architectural model of the same locale, built with food and water passages. He located there a group of white rabbits which integrated into the site’s overall whiteness, and which ended up taking over that site and turning it, as Ortega says, into the stage for a process of ingestion and digestion of the architectural domain and the place in which they were on display was eaten and processed by the rabbits that inhabited it.

(See interview with Alma Ruiz)

IVONNE PINI