Works Archives - Iliana Ortega

Toward of The Sea

iliana Ortega — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:59:58 +0000

Iliana Ortega: Toward the Sea

Although Iliana Ortega grew up in land-locked Mexico City, she has
always loved the sea, and some of her best work follows the complex
rhythms of the ocean. A short while ago, she decided to stay in Hawaii
for an extended period; as a result of this experience, the artist
produced a remarkable body of iridescent watercolors, whose light,
hues, and various densities mimic the sea in wonderful ways.
It is rare to find so much accomplishment within a genre and theme
unusually hard to represent. Somehow, Ortega has found the means
to mimic the play of light underwater, creating a visionary
comprehension of the luminous underworld we meet beneath the
ocean’s surface. In these magical experiments with light and color in
complex interactions, Ortega makes it clear that the luminosity she is
so attracted to is a major subject in its own right, refracted by the
prism of the ocean. In interesting ways, the studies’ focus allows
Ortega to create miniature environments whose effects are
remarkably original. The forms, regularly organic, are suffused with a
luminous intensity that astonishes the artist’s audience with passages
of color, often in blues and greens.

– Jonathan Goodman

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Summer Light

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:52:59 +0000

Antithetical to its name, most of the works in Summer Light include black-and-white images of oceans and skies—conceptual, photographic interventions that strip away color to reveal the haunting artifice of nature. These images recreate the uncapturable darkness of night and dazzling dance of light on water, while others retain the brilliant ceruleans and turquoises, as if for reference. Through the use of crisp contrast and wide angles that maximize the load of information, Ortega foregrounds the geometric properties of the universe, the grid that structures all space.

— Rob Goyanes

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New England

iliana Ortega — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 06:43:15 +0000

Discover the charm and essence of New England through the remarkable artwork of Iliana Ortega. Immerse yourself in the picturesque landscapes, coastal scenes, and quaint architecture that define this beloved region

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Essays On Light

iliana Ortega — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:25:54 +0000

Essays on Light

Essays On Light is a series of six short videos executed during my time at the Edward Albee Foundation in 2014. Is a collaboration with Ivan Naranjo as a sound designer.

https://www.ilianaortega.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Essays_on_Light_1080.mp4

Essays On Light 2014-2015

Full Moon, Essay On Light No. 1, Montauk, 2015; 7 min approx
Sun, Essay on Light, 2014; 1 min approx
Sky, Montauk, 2014; 1 min approx
Blue, Montauk, 2014; 1 min approx
Perigee Moon, Montauk, 2015; 8 min approx
Sunrise, Montauk, 2015; 12 min approx

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Notebook

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:40:25 +0000

At times, this series evokes the spectral grids of Agnes Martin, or the poetically arranged textiles of Eva Hess—but the works in Ortega’s “Notebook” series have a more gothic, informational sensibility. Tightly contained scribblings, neat stains of enamel and wood varnish, and indiscernible graphs populate these pages. Sometimes sparse, sometimes explosive, they indicate a sort of decaying mathematics. Created by translating sound onto the two-dimensional surfaces of the squared pages, these works illustrate Ortega’s post-minimal aesthetic, a reaction against closed geometric forms in favor of something more personal and open-ended.

— Rob Goyanes

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Las Imágenes Negras

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:39:52 +0000

Black is the conspicuous feature unifying Iliana Ortega’s series of images — a series I am tempted to call, after Goya, las imágenes negras.

Although trained as a painter, Ortega now works at the interface between photography and the manual techniques of drawing, painting, even scratching. Still, the central place of the camera — as opposed to the paintbrush – turns Ortega from creator to receiver and takes black from the realm of abstraction into the world: black becomes night.

The nocturnal is the true heart of this series. Night as a way of seeing, a perceptual state: when the visible hovers at the breaking point of its own emergence. In this way her work draws as much from the installation artist James Turrell as from photographers Robert Adams or John Gossage.

Ortega’s night is not the sulfuric orange of an urban night (there are no people in her work) but the darker night of the periphery. A world of barn silhouettes, country fireworks, rural alleyways. Sometimes – it seems – we might even be leagues under water: in an ocean night of air-traces. Most fascinating in this context is the manipulated photograph of sparkles upon the surface of a lake. Intellectually, we know this photograph must belong to the afternoon. Yet the encroaching darkness turns night back into metaphor – as any instance when color is lost and recognition frustrated when the line between abstraction and figuration is itself obscured. This disorientation is one of the key pleasures to be had in Ortega’s work – a disorientation that is less jarring than it is poetic. In Ortega’s best images we are never quite sure what we are looking at.

Unlike Goya who depicted horror, Ortega is interested in wonder. Night in Spanish — as in all romance languages — is feminine: la noche. In Ortega’s images it becomes almost maternal, lambent.

The longer one looks at these images the more they glow with the humble beauty of the world.

— Joshua Sperling

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Iceland

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:39:27 +0000

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Black and White Paintings

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:39:03 +0000

Originally conceived as drawings, Ortega now understands these works as interdisciplinary paintings. Inkjet prints—a format usually reserved for photography—are printed in total black, then treated with tape, pencil, crayon, and white-out. The completely black prints highlight a contradiction at the heart of photography: shadow is only capturable when there is light. The white elements in these works function under the symbolic order of geometric abstraction or constructivism, with the repeating gestures of lines, points, and spirals resulting in bleak, lunar terrains.

— Rob Goyanes

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Binary Paintings

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 02:38:07 +0000

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Beuys Drawings

iliana Ortega — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:32:57 +0000

“Beuys Drawings” is a series of ink drawings on Japanese paper created in 2006-07. I am interested in how the ink in conjunction with the transparency of the Japanese paper creates a visual haiku. I was inspired by Joseph Beuys early watercolors from 1989 and drawings in 1992.

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