Within the vast possibility of linkages, dialogues and reflections that contemporary art allows between the artist and the viewer in the face of recurrent themes in the world, aspects such as thematic absence, the ambiguity that allows the idea of closeness or distance, as well as the The constant presence of written reflections make up a large part of the corpus in the work of the plastic artist Luis Felipe Ortega (Mexico City, 1966).
Belonging to the generation of artists such as Daniel Guzmán, Laureana Toledo, Damián Ortega and Gabriel Kuri, among others, his philosophical training and interest in the possibilities offered by the written word have allowed a distinctive degree of permeability and consistency in the work of Luis Felipe Ortega, who for more than three decades has made use of video, sound, drawing, installation or sculptural placement to trigger various dialogues and reflections, broad enough to disrupt and question the existence of the human being in the face of his time and space.
A journey through a tunnel with a floor covered in broken glass (
The truth lives in the bottom of the tunnel
, 2010), an exploration that violently reveals the fabric between architecture and aquatic space (
Possessing Nature
, in partnership with the artist Tania Candiani for the 2015 Venice Biennale), or an entire room full of lines drawn by hand (Inverted Horizon, graphite on plaster, 2010-2020) show the artist's concerns about nodal areas around philosophy, politics and history, as well as aesthetics or morals.
(The truth lives at the bottom of the tunnel, 2022. Courtesy Museo Amparo)
However, for Ortega, contemporary art -immersed in a systematized dynamic of consumption and thematic explanation- has largely lost the possibility of open failure and disorientation, constants in the work of the author of works such as
Altamura
(video filmed in the island of Sonora of the same name, with audio fragments by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Louis Ferdinand Céline, among others. 2016) or
Expanded Double Exposure
(intervention of images from a catalog by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, 2012).
“Many people prefer to be told 'it's about this, this expo is about this, it has a theme'.
90% of contemporary art exhibitions are thematic;
my work is not like that.
So the visitor asks 'what is it about? What is the topic?
Ah, it's an art and maternity expo…', there is one thing clear and people decide to go or not.
I do not.
Now, what happens if you are not raising it, obviously people are going to experience a kind of restlessness, of uncertainty.
It is often believed that art is a matter of orientation, but art also has the function of disorienting, and much of what I do has the purpose of disorienting the everyday terrain, that is why I think that Passolini is one of the poets, thinkers, filmmakers more current, because much of his work had to do with that disorientation,
(Inverted horizon, graphite on plaster, 2010-2020. Courtesy Museo Amparo)
see what is not
One of the persistence in Ortega's work, the horizon, comes up about the effects and experiences that contemporary art detonates in the individual who faces his pieces, which the artist considers can achieve its complete form when there is a will of the spectator for "letting himself be affected by the piece", for the sake of recovering what he calls the "strangeness" or "affectation" before the world, part of a search and reflection that Luis Felipe Ortega has been decanting more clearly during the last two decades of work.
The artist reflects on this: “The horizon is a kind of game of how you think about it, from what you see to what you don't see.
And that is why history is so long and problematic around the horizon.
It is something that interests me in particular, and that I have been sensing, facing and confronting at different times.
And it is that as it happens with the horizon, as it moves or moves away, the closer you get, the more you move away too.
I think it's a sense that art in general and contemporary art in particular has, or that interests me in a specific way, which is: what you see only makes sense because it can lead you to what you don't see.
And there enters a plane that is not metaphysical and is detonated from the experience in the place, in relation to the piece, which is appealing like the horizon,
to both physical and mental mobility.
If you want to stay in the plane that you see or want to see, then you don't move and you don't walk.
That is why the material processes end up being so complex, because it will allow you different models of mobility, so that then you can intuit that there was something that is not completely predetermined for you to consume, but that you have to produce it”.
Ortega considers that the strangeness or affectation, which he considers vital to reflect and push new ideas, must have both attention and need to have an experience.
(Aspect of Luis Felipe Ortega's work in the exhibition... and then it will become a loophole. Courtesy of Museo Amparo)
“(...) Because you can intuit that there is something there that you don't know exactly what it is.
There is a strangeness.
I would think that museums make room for this possibility of strangeness to demand attention from a public that is passing by, that is out of phase with contemporary production speed, that leads you to ask 'why someone in the middle of 2022, instead of to produce something in half an hour, you can spend half a year doing it', and also you don't know if it's going to work at all.
True, you do tests and trust, but deep down there is nothing that tells us that: that it will work or operate in today's consumer world.
And you arrive at a museum and say 'let's see this piece, did they take it to produce and that's it?', or there are people who say (about Inverted Horizon, for example) 'what, it's not printed? ?'...
And I think that's a lot for someone who thinks that everything works like this in the contemporary world, that everything is like sending one more image to Instagram.
So, if art is not minimally out of phase with that, it is immersed in it too”, concludes the artist.