La Jornada: Voluntary repatriation, by Rubén Ortiz, criticizes the war and Trump’s policies

Criticism, the construction of identity and humor once again characterize the work that the artist, teacher and curator Rubén Ortiz Torres (Mexico City, 1964) presents in Voluntary repatriationtitle of his most recent exhibition at the OMR Gallery. The exhibition includes graphics, ceramics, textiles, a found object, arranged car parts, a “very conceptual” painting and drawing.

An art professor since 2001 at the University of California in San Diego, Ortiz Torres has lived in the United States for more than 35 years, although he maintains his contact with Mexico. In 2019, the University Museum of Contemporary Art organized his first retrospective: Customatism. He curates with Jesse Lerner of AztLÁn, time tunnelan exhibition currently exhibited in the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts. Opened to the public on May 25, it has received more than 200 thousand visitors so far.

Interviewed by The DayOrtiz Torres points out that he went to the United States “originally with the idea of ​​working on new technologies. I printed color photos, I learned to make video, I made a feature film, I also worked with digital technologies and programs that altered forms. Many of these experimentations with technologies have already expired and have become obsolete. I can’t even reproduce those pieces anymore.”

Voluntary repatriation It includes two ceramic murals and a gobelin that bears the inscription “Don’t fuck me.”

If at a certain point in his career, Ortiz Torres “perhaps” viewed textiles and ceramics with “disdain because they seemed very artisanal to me,” now he feels “very regretful about that because they are finally technologies that have lasted. Ceramics are an important part of the country’s culture. The same thing happens with textiles.”

Both ceramic murals, each composed of several mosaics, were made in Guadalajara, where he has recently worked, as well as at Cerámica Suro and the Nodo workshop. Apocalypse nowin cobalt blue, refers to the mural painted in the Temple of Jesús Nazareno by José Clemente Orozco, an artist that Ortiz Torres is very interested in, as are the writer Juan Rulfo and the architect Luis Barragán.

It is “a very traditional process; however, design is a collage digital whose background is the mural The Apocalypseby Orozco.” The exhibitor’s piece includes a “Russian tank entering Ukraine, a destroyed mosque and drones,” among other contemporary elements.

The second mural, The burning of idolsmade using the sgraffito technique, is based on a drawing made by tlacuilos in Tlaxcala, in which some friars destroy pre-Columbian figures. During the making of the work, fires occurred in Southern California, which is why palm trees are seen burning and a reference to the mural The man on fireby Orozco.

There are nods to the Fantastic Four, characters from a comic that, for the interviewee, refer to the idea of The man on fire. Also present are the marches that were happening in Los Angeles, as well as an ICE agent. “The pre-Columbian figures are mixed with a Barbie, a Mickey Mouse piñata and my works,” he notes.

Criticism of nationalism

The found object, or ready madeis the trunk hood of a Tijuana patrol car that looks like an abstract painting. In reality, the patrol was burned during a war between cartels. Ortiz Torres varnished it to protect it. The only painting in the exhibition is made from the ashes of six flags that the artist burned as “a critique of nationalism.” In this new “black, anarchist” flag, there is something iconoclastic. That is, “these gestures of renewal and how the phoenix is ​​reborn from the ashes.”

While Ortiz Torres worked The pinkest revolutionwith car paint on a door of another burned patrol car, “when applying glitter, which on the border is used to fix cars, in Mexico there were protests over the rape of a girl. Feminists protested by throwing glitter at the police. So, I made a series of pieces in which glitter is thrown on patrol cars. My sister Gabriela (the composer Gabriela Ortiz) wrote the piece diamond revolutionwhich will be presented with a ballet in the main hall of the Palace of Fine Arts.”

Currently, the artist is working on a series based on the first war photographs that existed when the United States invaded Mexico in 1847. The exhibition includes photolithography Phantom limb (phantom limb), originating from a daguerreotype “taken at the time when the marines They enter and witness a leg amputation.” In the lower part of the piece, the lost limb has been recreated with the part of Mexico that “no longer is,” but is in the “unconscious of the country.”

The title of the exhibition takes up a current policy of Donald Trump’s government, but transferred to the personal field. “In this case it is a voluntary repatriation because I come because I want to and I have the opportunity.”

Ortiz Torres wants the body of work to be seen as “a reflection on power in general. About the abuse of power from some people to others, wherever and however it may be.”

Voluntary repatriation It is exhibited until August 20 at the OMR Gallery (Córdoba 100, Colonia Roma, Mexico City).