Erudite Contemporary Idolators, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 71 x 102 cm
Adios Amigo
Oil on Canvas, 2009, 71 x 102 cm
Violent World, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 130 x 150 cm
The Getaway, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 122 x 69 cm
The Ugly, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 102 x 122 cm
We Surround Them, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 71 x 102 cm
Gringo Rebel, Oil on Canvas, 2009, 122 x 102 cm
23.05.09 – 26.06.09
Golden Parachutes is pleased to announce the first German solo exhibition of the American painter, Ernesto Ortiz.
In ten new oil paintings, Ortiz explores borderlands as a physical territory and a locus for the production of desire. Throughout his work, Ortiz focuses on the interstice between the mythology and socio-political reality of Mexico using imagery and techniques gleaned from Western films, pop art, kitsch, social history and critical theory.
Ortiz crafts a fantastical world between figuration and abstraction; his candy colored deserts are a direct commentary on the relationship between fantasy and liminal space. Much of Ortiz’s source material is derived from films, as Westerns have played a major role in the American and European projection of a unified Mexican identity. Ortiz uses stills from the films of Sam Peckinpah, Steve McQueen and Sergio Leone, among others, to work against the hegemonic idealization of Mexico as a land of cultural and ritual purity.
The artist understands his Mexican identity as not only a reflection of Mexico’s unique and diverse culture, but also the fantasies of dominant culture. He began work on Gringo Rebel as an attempt to articulate this mixture. The painting Adios Amigo, inspired by the spaghetti western director Sergio Leone’s film, A Fistful of Dollars, explores the dominant mythology that whiteness represents a lack of ethnicity. Tomorrow by Sundown, Better Be Out of Town Boy, which derives its title from the Ricky Nelson song Half Breed uses imagery culled from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch to articulate a commentary on the Minutemen, a controversial contemporary American civilian-activist group that patrols the border between Mexico and the United States.
While several of the works have explicitly political overtones, Ortiz is most interested in articulating painting of “betweeness,” both stylistically and thematically. His large scale works, Violent World and Global Destination, use intricate mark making, visual distortion and text to depict a spaces brimming with paradox. Ortiz’s borderlands are both open and claustrophobic, inviting and menacing, appealing and foreign.
Ernesto Ortiz is (b. 1980) studied at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco (BA, 2004), the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille and the Studio Art Center in Florence. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Germany. Ortiz currently lives and works in Berlin.