PhammerHead Chronicles

In the pleasure of introducing to you an artist by the name of Damián Ortega, in this blog I’m going to share with you an assignment  for a class I had to write where I had to look for an artist that will be participating at this year’s Venice Biennale (the Biennale is sort of like the Superbowl of the art world only in Venice). In searching for an artist, I believed I had found one of the best artist that the Venice Biennale would have to offer.

Okay, before I get into this, I must first address a brief overview of the history of this artist.

• Born in 1967, Mexico City, Ortega gained influence from Gabriel Orozco (a sculpture and photographer), to which Ortega studied and established well into the late 80’s. There, he absorbed that acute attention to subsequently refine his own visual and conceptual abilities to emerge through that focus on the points of intersection between architecture, sculpture, and spatial analysis.
• He is currently found living and working in Berlin, Germany, or Mexico City.

Now how is he the best artist you ask ??

Well in Ortega’s work, objects are never allowed to rest—they are simply pulled apart, suspended, or even rearranged, to call attention to everything around us and finding that hidden poetry in the everyday world. As you can see with his art work, he likes to take simple objects such as the Volkswagen beetle and blasts them into the tiny atoms that make them apart of what they truly are or like a life-size model making kit. It is through these manipulations, where even such everyday products of coca cola bottles and caps can be transformed into imaginary ways. Also in his work, there are hidden messages where Ortega uses an example of a tortilla whereby cutting slots into the edges that fit together and act like a scale model of a modern apartment. But like everything in this world, nothing lasts forever and the work will eventually diminish, with time, and it displays that strong but playful tension between fragility and longevity.

In movement to what he’s doing at the Biennale

Which is actually being displayed on outside, in the Encyclopedic Palace. Central exhibition. He attempts to create a communicative system where he identifies the form but transforms the space as it as if it were a fabric that can be physical but hidden and develops a subsurface through which you can talk, breathe, or communicate with the outside world. Basically what he wanted to do was convert a space in a sensitive system as if it were alive, like a body with an idea that would also establish a communication between a person and another. To simplify it further, it’s like the game of cups we used when we were kids to pretend we were talking on the phone with each other. 

Critiques

Some critiques in general, is that I found that a lot of people basically find that he has no boundaries and that he explores all venues with his own style of wit and a sense of discovery with a search of truth within each of the subjects he chooses to work on.