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 — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 22:24:35 +0000

En el arte se generan imágenes a partir de experiencias manifestando apreciaciones
marcadas por historias personales que surgen de su entorno.

En el discurso artístico en la obra de Iliana Ortega genera nuevas formas de ver fenómenos
de la luz y la fusión así como su ausencia.

Summer Light, es una construcción que se vale de la fotografía, video y dibujo digital
que permite la interacción agraciada de diferentes fuentes de luz, como la belleza hibernal
con paisajes sutiles que alteran la corriente de temporada en la escena, generando
nuevas formas de representación del paisaje.

Randy Walz

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Creación en Movimiento

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:47:42 +0000

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Lo Posible De No Habitar

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:22:00 +0000

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(…………)

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 11:12:49 +0000

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Depths of Black

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 09:54:58 +0000

Depths of Black explores the nocturnal urban landscape for inspiration, Iliana Ortega uses darkness to frame light. Her photographs are layers of pure black pigments, with only a hint of the landscape. Using drill bits, she scratches delicate abstractions into the blackness. The lead of a pencil mark shimmers with light. The white of the paper becomes the foreground when revealed. Iliana states that her ultimate goal is to “uncover the profound relationship between fiction, representation, and reality.” Her abstract drawings are elemental as they seek the beauty and depth of silence.

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Intangible Horizons

iliana Ortega — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 09:41:50 +0000

Art Sites is pleased to present Intangible Horizons, a group exhibition curated by Yoab Vera including works by Iliana Ortega, Andres Ramirez Gaviria, and Alan Ruiz. The three artists of this exhibition share a perceptual and minimal sensibility as well as a commitment to a kind of conceptual formalism that is critically engaged and transverses ideological frameworks. Intangible Horizons gathers three sources of contemporary aesthetics that examine evolving boundaries as fluctuating structures within indefinite areas. Once a boundary is traversed, either physical or conceptual, the understanding of that frontier becomes part of a defined space, and the definition of that boundary changes while the new frontier expands. When a boundary is surpassed the ideological concept of a limit is renovated, and the previously considered boundary becomes part of the defined universe. At that precise moment, the boundary finishes its ontological essence of being a tangible limit and becomes an intangible material of the continuous area.

Once the unimaginable is discovered, it is immediately surpassed, and the unimaginable becomes the comprehensible reference for the pursuit of the undefined. Thus, frontiers are firstly understood as unfamiliar and ambiguous; later become intimate and exact. In Intangible Horizons, each work activates a reflection of the self as a trigger for future impact. The pursuit for the unimaginable exists inside an infinite route. The innumerable models to define the infinite are only possible by definite variables.

Iliana Ortega unravels riddles of light over an obscure path by investigating the limits of drawing and photography to abstract natural phenomena. Her practice is an act of generative destruction in which the artist uses diverse tools against a pure black surface to reveal the illusion of light depicted in a photographic composition. Ortega’s excavations into flat surfaces are a reconsideration of limits and surpassing that material “boundary” through the revealing of a new texture and light source. Her compositions offer possibilities, fluctuating between urban landscapes, moving light, or a night sky, yet they offer no certainties, provoking a persistence in looking.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria questions the semantic limits of structures within spatial and temporal realms. His work is invested in recent advancements in science, technology, and cybernetics while appropriating the language of minimalism and 20th-century abstraction. In his work, the artist defines the sound of astronomical objects through images, breaking the boundary of any concrete definition toward a dynamic ambiguous space between scientific perception and art.

Alan Ruiz’s work exists at the intersection of sculpture, site-specific installation, and performative architecture. Ruiz defines conceptual formalism as he explores the multi-stable relationships that exist between an object and its context. Treating both as political, aesthetic, and often institutional materials, he is interested in questioning the autonomy and relational value of art as a perceptual, social, and economic construction. Ruiz’s Proposals outline a conceptually plausible, yet physically impossible project; the limit is the boundary of the non-economic transaction, which nonetheless occurs when the work becomes part of the collector, that is crossing the boundary between the private and public.

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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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Las Imágenes Negras

iliana Ortega — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 18:12:12 +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 INTERSECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MANUAL TECHNIQUES OF DRAWING, PAINTING, AND EVEN SCRATCHING.

WITH THESE IMAGES, ORTEGA SWITCHES 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 THESE IMAGES. NIGHT AS A WAY OF SEEING, A PERCEPTUAL STATE: WHEN THE VISIBLE HOVERS AT THE BREAKING POINT OF ITS OWN EMERGENCE.

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 UNDERWATER: 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 A METAPHOR: AS ON 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 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 BEAUTY OF THE WORLD.

Joshua Sperling

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Memento Mori

iliana Ortega — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 19:32:00 +0000

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