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... and so it shall become rift. Luis Felipe Ortega
What is a horizon? It is a line that appears to separate the sky from the earth. That limit is nevertheless unstable because it depends on both the land itself and the observer’s gaze, such that there is always something relative and artificial about it. In that sense, the space that emerges from that ambiguity is a product of a set of relationships, and is never static, always moving. Those relations, in turn, generate different experiences among observers because they involve not only their respective gazes but also their bodies, which enable that relationship. Luis Felipe Ortega has been exploring this ambiguous, interstitial space and the particular experience it produces over the last fifteen years, an exploration that guides the exhibition ... and so it shall become rift.
Drawing on relationships between landscapes, architectures, objects, and bodies, as well as between images and volumes, and influenced by the tradition of minimalist and conceptual art in the United States and the neo-concrete movement in Brazil, Ortega tasks himself with producing liminal spaces in which the materials and techniques he uses become fundamental: both the scale of the pieces and the material components of each of them entail a specific work that together enable a peculiar way of imagining the time invested in their completion. In this way, times and spaces coexist in unique ways and can only be perceived in the experience of being there, in the exhibition space. That is why the apparent simplicity of each piece is just that: pure appearance. Insofar as they are observed carefully and they move about, they take on a different dimension, manifesting the multitude of layers they comprise.
This exhibition is thus conceived as a permanent mobile landscape comprising the different pieces and the spaces and times of the Museum. Through sculptures made expressly for this show, together with drawings, videos, photographs, paintings, and objects, it becomes possible to see Ortega’s work as a constant inquiry into the indeterminacy that always characterizes relationship. In this exhibition, what a horizon is remains an open question.
Luis Felipe Ortega | Artist
Daniel Montero | Curator
