Damián Ortega or the story of the frustrated muralist who disintegrated a 'vocho' in Venice

The Medellin market had never seen anything like it.

Among the butcher shops and greengrocers in the bazaar, one of the few that still resist the gentrification of the Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, twenty young artists with an extravagant appearance appeared that morning in 1999.

They had rented a venue and hoped to sell their creations alongside traditional food stalls.

There was music, they cooked curries for everyone and ended up throwing a big party.

Among them was Damián Ortega, a young political cartoonist who was beginning to make his way in the art world and wanted to be like the great Mexican muralists.

His contribution to the improvised exhibition was less orthodox than that of his referents: some toy robots, bought on the spot,

The paths of art are inscrutable.

The project, which they called Market Economy, was the germinal seed of the Kurimanzutto gallery, which over time would become one of the most prestigious in the country.

Two decades later, Ortega (55 years old) has just received the Zurich Art Prize, an important award, and his latest exhibition, Visión Expandida, can be seen these days at the Botín Center in Santander, Spain.

In between he has become a renowned multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited in museums around the world and has also ventured into publishing with Alias, a revered independent art book imprint.

The dreams of becoming a muralist, yes, they stayed by the wayside.

The Mexican artist Damián Ortega in his studio in Mexico City. Nayeli Cruz

Ortega hasn't had to go around the newsrooms of the big national newspapers selling cartoons for a living for a long time.

He is now a sought-after artist, respected by critics and with a long career behind him.

He works in two workshops, barely 200 meters apart, among the old stone houses in the center of Tlalpan, south of Mexico City.

One seems to work more like a warehouse for old works: there are wooden boxes everywhere and a recreation of a submarine suspended from the ceiling.

The December morning that he receives EL PAÍS, he is wearing jeans stained with clay that he is using for one of his latest projects, about which he still does not want much to be known.

The round glasses and cropped goatee make him look like a contemporary—or perhaps conceptual,

In a corner of the patio, covered by a stiff yellow tarpaulin, rests the Volkswagen beetle that made it famous worldwide.

The

, a car that was one of the most powerful symbols of popular Mexico, was a gift from his father, the actor Héctor Ortega.

The artist disintegrated it piece by piece, suspended it from the ceiling of a museum, called it the

, and managed to wow the art scene at the 2002 Venice Biennale.

A terrorist asleep on the plane to Paris

But before that there was a time of struggling to make a living from his art, when Kurimanzutto began to show his head on the art scene: “Many of us didn't have a space to market our work.

When the gallery started, it was to unite many forces.

Before we had done it with a group called Temístocles: many of us got together to be able to clean a house that they lent us, write texts, make a newspaper and generate a community.

Now it can be seen as something highly questioned, whether it was commercial art or not, but it is very necessary to have independence, to be able to produce and show the work.

Everyone contributed ideas.

We began to generate money, to be self-sufficient,

the alternative of being able to go out to exhibit outside of Mexico without depending on the bureaucracy or national collectors who were very limited to one type of art.

A huge channel was opened.”

Although the years as a cartoonist were behind him, they left a strong mark on his work in the form of small doses of irony.

"Humor is present from the cartoons in all of his works, in the most heroic and the simplest," says Mónica Manzutto, director of the Kurimanzutto gallery together with José Kuri.

Not only professionally.

In the year 2000, Manzutto and Ortega traveled to Paris to do an exhibition.

“We bought a bottle of tequila and we finished it on the trip.

We fell asleep and when I woke up Damian he had a beard, glasses: he had dressed up as a terrorist.

I took some photos of it.

I remember that moment, it was very incredible, before the attacks of September 11”.

Detail of one of the work tables in the studio of the Mexican artist Damián Ortega. Nayeli Cruz

magazine

“Ortega does not leave any object alone.

If you show him a golf ball, he wants to know what's inside.

But he does not alter things definitively.

What he touches can be rearmed (...) Reality is an anagram for him, a word that changes meaning when its letters are rearranged”.

Ortega is more prosaic in his explanations.

"I wanted to be a muralist," he says, "with all this figure from the heroic moment of Mexican art."

But Gabriel Orozco crossed his path at the end of the 80s: friend, teacher and one of the great living figures of Latin American art.

Together with Abraham Cruzvillegas, Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Kuri and other young artists, they formed what became known as the Friday Workshop, a focus for creation and exchange of ideas outside the circuits of hegemonic art.

That experience nurtured Ortega and helped him redirect his steps towards less conventional paths.

“In general I think that contemporary art is overrated.

Right after, I think of some artists of my generation that I respect, like Dr. Lakra or Miguel Calderón, people I had the opportunity to meet and share moments with.

I don't know Damián Ortega personally, but he is on that list.

His work seems to me essential to understand the current art scene in Mexico.

But above all I respect him for his interest or need to share ideas and knowledge”, says the renowned illustrator Jorge Alderete.

Damián Ortega in his studio in Mexico City. Nayeli Cruz

Ortega did not finish high school.

The Friday Workshop was his school.

“University was decadent, horribly boring.

We all needed to find an alternative university, invent our own academy.

It was very stimulating, we learned many new things”.

There they not only made the type of creations associated with museums, the great power centers of art, an idea that Ortega has always tried to subvert.

His first works as a painter were signs, the kind that decorate storefronts in poor neighborhoods.

Corn tortillas at the Tate Modern

Perhaps those beginnings —perhaps the influence of his parents, two convinced militants of the left— were the ones that caused one of the obsessions that have marked his work: the relationship between art and space, whether public or private.

Also the concern to bring to the most elite circles of the artistic world, such as the Venice Biennale itself, sophisticated representations of Mexican popular culture.

“I feel that the work that I do is not necessarily elitist.

Let 's see the

unarmed

) parents arrived with their children to explain how the car worked or to tell stories about when they had that car.

They are interpretations that are opening up, I do not impose a reading of anything.

When I lived outside of Mexico it was interesting to see that a lot of the language in my work was very local, it had to do with a lot of Mexican cultural roots.”

Ortega poses for a portrait in his studio.

Nayeli Cruz

And playing with his roots earned him awards, scholarships, and even an artist residency in Berlin, where he lived for several years.

With his work

, a sculpture made from corn tortillas, the basis of traditional Mexican food, he exhibited at the Tate Modern in London.

“His work is sketchy and yet unpredictable, a seductive combination,” says

adding: “At his best, Ortega appeals to a fundamental curiosity about how things work: not just machines, but social systems as well. and broader economics.

“I was always fascinated by Damián's ability to understand the Mexican environment and break it down,” Manzutto agrees.

The materials he uses could not be more varied: from Volkswagen to corn tortillas, clay, bricks or industrial components.

“It is very pleasant how one piece leads to another, opens new lines.

I have let myself go, trying to navigate according to what the pieces themselves and the space propose to me.

I like to be fresh to get into something new.”

He says that he likes to be guided by chaos as a form of resistance to the more capitalist dynamics of art.

“The neoliberal system forces you to have a certain logic at work.

People locate you as a brand.

When I turned 40, a friend who was my neighbor in Berlin and who was also an artist told me: 'Look, when you turn 40 you have to decide between being an entrepreneur or continuing to be an artist'”.

Ortega chose the latter.

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