EXHIBITION ARCHIVE
Acts of Serenity
May 25 - July 13, 2024
Renzo Ortega is a contemporary painter who is also a performer, musician (of techno cumbia and punk rock) and an installation artist. Best known for his fantastical compositions which incorporate elements of mythology and popular culture, Ortega takes an entirely different approach for Acts of Serenity, turning the tradition of still life painting into a meditative practice.
Ortega begins by carefully arranging and lighting the objects on a specially constructed set in his studio. He paints in silence, integrating his breath and posture with the act of applying pigment on linen. With their subtle color gradations and painterly qualities the still-lifes showcase the mastery and immediacy of his technique, and reference inspirations both historic and contemporary. In Nirvana, an old pair of Converse sneakers and a guitar pedal become a monument to Kurt Kobain, while a hat and tulip in another honor Van Gogh’s Spirit.
STATEMENT
My new body of work, a collection of still-lifes made especially for this exhibition, arises from the stimulation of ideas through observation and introspection. To achieve multidimensionality using the formal tradition of easel painting with oils, I create a set in my art studio to display the objects. I paint in silence, focus on my breathing, and with an awareness of my body posture concerning the object I paint, forming a unit with the canvas and the easel. Painting is a physical experience; my process helps to create an environment where I can materialize the intangible, capturing the essence of what I see and experience.
Painting is not just creating pictures, it is more--it is the whole art object, from the stretcher to the canvas to the paint to the brushstroke marks. I made most of these works on linen instead of cotton canvas, since linen adds a particular resonance—I like to call it a sound--to the paintings, helping to create multidimensional atmospheric spaces. After a couple of decades of painting from intuition, fantasy, and symbolic narrative, this body of work follows a different path, going hand in hand with the conventions of classical painting. That change gives me freedom, allowing me to open new doors in my work. The paintings are an invitation to an alternative world, a better world, in which I seek to receive and embrace the viewer.
I think of art as a human essence, from one’s inner being, linked to the development of thought and the spiritual. Since the beginning, painters have forged painting from the mystical path, achieving pictorial developments with discipline and mastery of the craft. A continuous mantric repetition of a physical-mental exercise, such as painting, is what I seek to embody in Acts of Serenity.
Sequential
May 20 - July 8, 2023
Painting is a sequential endeavor. A painting consists of a sequence of brush strokes, a series is a sequence of paintings, and a body of work is the culmination of the artist’s production. Every painter is also indebted to the long succession of painters who preceded them. In this exhibition, painters Chieko Murasugi and Renzo Ortega, arriving from very different backgrounds and pictorial approaches, create works that speak to the idea of sequence, both within the canvas and outside of it, all the while expressing their vision of what painting means at this moment.
Renzo Ortega's painting practice consists of consistent, repetitive processes, which is how he masters his craft. Renzo believes that a constant pictorial rhythm has existed since the beginning of human existence. He relates rhythm with heartbeats and connects paintings with bodies' frequencies. For Renzo, this consistent sequential rhythm exists in the masterworks of the history of easel painting. For example, in the drumroll-like strokes of bold impressionist brushwork, in the obsessively revisiting over and over color sequences of Van Gogh, in the endless different point of view approach on the same theme of modernism, to the tremendous progressive line of twentieth-century pictorial isms, which unleashed a free-minded contemporary painting that is the result of an infinite loop of expression through painting's physicality.
Sequential invites the observer on a visual journey, generating an organic relationship between the artworks and the gallery's visitors. Through the dynamics of color, form, ideas, and narratives, Chieko Murasugi and Renzo Ortega seek to generate a dialogue and the experience of art appreciation with the audience.
STATEMENT
Art generates bonds and belongs to people's memories. My artwork reflects the sociopolitical and geographical context where I live. In Lima-Perú, where I grew up, the Andes' colors melt with urban chaos. I lived in a multicultural New York for 16 years. I now live in North Carolina, where the landscape view transformed the colors of my palette. These transitions have influenced my art practice; I embody freedom in the various styles that coexist in my paintings, and I believe painting is an infinite loop of life itself, a vast universe of artistic creation.
In North Carolina, I have been working on a series of paintings about my impressions of our current times. My native heritage, empowered by my immigrant experience, solidifies my American identity that connects and acknowledges the lands of the original people that have been here in the past, is part of the present, and constructs a prominent future. I believe my artworks belong to the Southern region and are part of the American Painting's journey that started thousands of years ago, survived the European encounter, adapted to the modernist twenty-century, and are embedded now with our digital contemporaneity.