Tautological Ballad
Over thirty years, Bernardo Ortiz has shaped an artistic practice based on his idea of a page. For Ortiz, a “page” can be a “material support” or a “discursive space” in which the content affects the surface and vice versa. In Tautological Ballad [Balada Tautológica]—his most recent solo exhibition—that notion of “page” is traversed by the idea of chance to become, in Ortiz’s words, “an antenna or attractor of accidents.” Here, randomness not only operates as a discourse but also as a formal and material strategy and a trigger for the arrangement of works in the exhibition space. Thus, the unpublished pieces of Ortiz reveal and enhance unknown dimensions of chance and introduce values that give rise to renewed readings of the artist’s work.
In the construction of Tautological Ballad—as in all his exhibitions—Ortiz dedicates a prolonged period to recognizing and inhabiting the architectural space and then lets himself be carried away by the magic happening there. This unique modus operandi is fundamental for the artist, as it allows him to define a large part of the works that make up the exhibition, starting from the sensitive activation of what he calls an “ocean of the indistinct.” For Ortiz, the “indistinct” is a sort of diffuse space that resists definition but acts as a creative and connecting force that gives meaning to his work.
The transformation of the architectural space begins with subtle pictorial interventions in the form of windows that, in unison, constitute a sort of underlying exhibition. This first layer creates an almost imperceptible pictorial and discursive support that results from Ortiz’s personal experience of closely observing the Renaissance frescoes painted by Fra Angelico in the cells of the San Marcos convent in Florence. The relationship between the murals painted by the monk and the architecture that houses them becomes an obsession for Ortiz, which then gets translated into the traces of non-existent and diffuse paintings he captures on the gallery walls.
Ortiz adds a second symbolic layer to his “ocean of the indistinct” when he installs his drawings on paper and canvas—sometimes supported by wooden frames, sometimes by structures derived from modern architecture—on the walls intervened with the pictorial traces described above. The development of the drawings responds to the idea that the repetition of simple actions can produce complex patterns. A series of variables, such as the weight of the support, the size, the number of colors, and the brushes, are determined by the flow of random numbers continuously recorded by meteorological satellites, which the artist uses as a sort of oracle to make decisions. With its light humor, this game involves long hours of work to make visible the state of a particular instant.
Ortiz has always played with the idea of introducing an exogenous element in his drawings to exploit the possibilities of drawing. Hence his interest in freeing it from its traditional projective function to turn it into a support that makes errors visible since it is there that not only a certain humanity is revealed but also the presence of the artist “facing the abyss of time.”
Tautological Ballad explores the conceptual foundations of Bernardo Ortiz’s artistic practice from an evocative and nostalgic point of view. His search is not only reflected in works with a visuality that resists language and invites silent presence but also in his interdisciplinary collaboration with electronic musician Julio Victoria. A long dialogue around sound, language, repetition, and geometry materializes in a vinyl with experimental electronic compositions that are born from an impulse, from the attentive listening of a word that becomes an abstract noise, from transmission and consequent resignification.
Text by Paula Bossa
