Damián Ortega, exploring vision

When we use the term “suspension of disbelief” we are referring to accepting the rules of the game that a fictional system proposes to us: the impossible is admitted so that the story seems feasible. The ability to make us temporarily believe in the implausible It is one of the skills of those who write, perform or perform a magic trick before our eyes, making us forget that there is a rabbit in the hat.

Unlike a theater, when entering the space of the white exhibition cube, the reaction can be opposite: yes, we can be surprised by the beauty and delicacy of a piece, but at the same time, as if the artist were a potential suspect, we want find out where the trap is.

When visiting the exhibition Damian Ortega expanded view at the loot center there is a first moment of amazement as we see them fly, broken into millions of objects, from a chair, a car, an exploding dwarf star or the core of a planet.

Everything fluctuates in Damián Ortega's works, yes, but everything is connected and in order

But always, holding each of the atomized parts of each of the nine installations, all the steel cables can be seen. Volcanothe one with the most ropes has 1,007 to suspend glass and small volcanic rock stones.

The trick is in sight, the illusion of the system is revealed. As if Ortega wanted to make clear the physical suspension, the mental credulity of these material constructions and place us at the center of questioning any system.

[A thousand thiefs in search of an author]

Everything fluctuates, yes, but everything is connected and in order: in a mythical Beetle, the “people's car” that the German factory took to Mexico and where it became a symbol of development and the illusion of class change, in the first of this series of installations Cosmic Thing (2002), or on a simple chair, HLD (tall, long, deep) (2009), where he explodes three seating structures.

Everything everyday disappears into thin airas did all the material in Marxist texts on the evolution of financial systems.

This strategy, explosion, but also a precise exercise in taxonomyordering and projecting each element in a precise place, it applies to the cadences of the human: that of the factory and the home, but also that of work, with the hundreds of basic tools, hammer and sickle included, that point us in controller of the universe (2007); the generation of waste, in Star dust (2016) or the drug economy in Hollow/Stuffed: Market Law (2012). All of them, in short, productive rhythms.

At the same time, Damián Ortega applies the gesture to other structures that are so close but that surpass us, alluding to other rhythms, the uncontrollable ones of nature, thus expanding a critical look at technology for science: the lava from the volcano, but also the atomic composition of the drop of water frozen in Distortion Cloud (2018) or the invitation to Journey to the Center of the Earth: Penetrable (2014).

Damián Ortega applies the gesture to other structures that are so close but that surpass us, the uncontrollable nature

Perhaps the repetition of this strategy – never before have all these works been exhibited together – will make the gesture lose strength. But it can also show another layer of these ironic works.

Returning to the last title, so literary and fantastic, it makes me think that it is this adventure of narrative and language that connects all the pieces. It is not the material, but the linguistic that sustains our system of perception and relationship with reality: the logic of human language naming things to make them exist, imposing its point of view, but also opening itself to multiple possibilities.

The exhibition begins with the series of twisted iron pieces that collect the alphabet in their shadows. First we find the letter “z”, with a handwriting that, according to the artist, responds to his mother’s French-speaking colonialist teaching; but we end with the “a” of Pseudonymwhich for me is your most beautiful projecta publisher that translates artists' texts into Spanish and that started collaboratively.

Like each of the mobiles, floorless sculptures gathered as a team, the first of the books, Talking to Marcel Duchampby Pierre Cabanne, was collaboratively translated and printed cheaply so that its distribution is accessible to everyone. Pure expanded vision.

[Juan Muñoz, drafting the trilero]

Follow the topics that interest you