Iliana Ortega

Water Monolith, Big Sur, CA

2015

Iliana Ortega was born in Mexico City, she studied at Yale, receiving her MFA degree in painting from that institution in 2011. Since then, she has lived on the Lower East Side in New York City, where she has a studio at El Clemente, a former public school now becoming a local art center. Her current work centers on iridescent watercolors using color-simulating light reflection. She also works with black-and-white photographs of seascapes and small towns occurring in places well-known and not so well-known--eastern Long Island and Iceland are among the sites of her images. Ortega also creates more technically complex images, in which photos are embellished and changed by pencil, paint, etc. Her imagery tends toward a deep romanticism, in which the play of light on darkened water and waves suggests a visionary reading of nature, one that looks to an apocalyptic scenario that overwhelms the artist’s audience with its drama and high visual contrast. Romanticism, generally speaking, does not fly high in the American art world; we are given to politics and social issues much more than infinite dreams. So it makes sense that Ortega comes from another culture, one in which an archaic, romantically weighted vision makes itself felt in her own work--even if that work shows no signs of particularity as Mexican culture or a Mexican artifact of time.