No hay espacio más ancho que el dolor,
no hay universo como aquél sangra.
Luis Poirot 1
Andrew Ortiz' giclée prints are digital collages, transparent and opaque layering of fragments of cultural and personal history, a process analogous to the function of memory in the construction of cultural and personal identity.
To say that Ortiz' works entail collage is say that the elements from which the works are constituted are always already mediated. Thus Franz Mons:
A collage unites in a composition elements which originate from the civilized environment, bear traces of modification, and are thereby socially mediated. . . . Collage transposes received reality, as seen through the filter of civilization, into an artistic world ripe for reconstitution. 2
Rosalind Krauss has urged that earlier, non-digital means of collage entails a system of difference, of presence and absence.
As a system, collage inaugurates a play of differences which is both about and sustained by an absent origin: the forced absence of the original plane by the superposition of another plane, effacing the first in order to represent it. Collage's very fullness of form is grounded in this forced impoverishment of the ground-a ground both supplemented and supplanted. . . . But in collage, in fact, the ground is literally masked and riven. It enters our experience not as an object of perception, but as an object of discourse, or representation. 3
This absent origin is modified in digital collage, for while the ground may be "masked and riven" by the superimposed element, this concealing need not be total, and in Ortiz' works often is not. A layer in digital collage may be as readily rendered as transparent, or translucent, as opaque. This potential for transparency in digital as distinct from non-digital collage enables a layering more nuanced than simple substitution, in which the either-or of presence and absence is obviated in favor of a sublation in which entities are both introduced and negated, equiprimordially partly present and partly absent. In Leaf, the Virgin of Guadeloupe is merged with a palmate leaf. In Man Becoming Woman, the translucency of the forms is a synecdoche for the metamorphosis inherent in the equivocality of the forms of the figure and the Zurbaran-like drapery suggestive of Veronica displaying the sudarium, while a hand probes the wound in the torso, suggestive of Thomas touching Christ's wounded side. Rather than the sense of a fullness of form being predicated on impoverishment of the ground through superposition, the fullness of form in the transparency or translucency digital collage enables is instead predicated on the perceptual simultaneity of ground and superimposed plane. Certainly this transparency does not always obtain, as in Thorn, in which the stone encircled by a corona of thorns replacing the conventional representation of the motif of the Sacred Heart is quite dense and solid indeed, so that the luminous image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe forming the ground of Thorn is-by virtue of its luminosity-perceptually translucent in comparison. So also the density of the heart-stone in Corazon.
The association of density and solidity with heaviness and darkness, and of luminosity with weightlessness and lightness may well be culturally determined, or at least culturally mediated and particularized in its manifestations, though it gives the appearance of being natural, of being grounded in the phenomenology of beings in their appearings to embodied consciousness, and thus transcending cultural particularity. To engage this aporia is to engage these works.
It is the process of layering, of placing one element over another, a procedure analogous on the level of cultural formation to the overlaying of indigenous Meso-American cultures by the cultural impositions of the Spanish Conquistadors, and on the level of formation of individual identity to the overlaying of discrete, fragmentary, experiences in all their radical historicity to blend into a perceptual whole, and the salient potential for metaphor and allegory that this layering enables, that distinguishes the work of Andrew Ortiz. Combining pre-Columbian and Christian iconography, Ortiz interweaves cultural, art, and personal histories. Collage as a process consisting in the layering of images is thus "a demonstration of the reversible relationship (the continuum) between art and life." 4 From this process, a creatio de nova obtains from appropriation and transformation, in which the universal emerges from the most personal.
Andrew Ortiz' recent exhibitions include: Andrew Ortiz, El Museo, Buffalo, New York; Salvajes, Locos, Niños y Poetas, Mexico; Binational Art Exhibition, Paraguay; Within Sight, Arlington Museum of Art; The Power of Place: Contemporary Chicano Artists, Fine Silver Gallery, San Antonio; Digital Code, the University of Texas at Dallas; Close to the Border VII, New Mexico State University; Open and Closed, Ball State University; Mi Familia: Words Unspoken, Words Unheard, Southwest School of Arts and Crafts, San Antonio; Disconnection Reconnection, University of Houston; El Espejo, Arte Latino, ArtScan Gallery, Houston; Andrew Ortiz, En Foco, New York; C:\Pixels, Tarrant County Community College Southeast. Andrew Ortiz is Professor of Art at the University of Texas at Arlington. Ortiz received the Master of Fine Arts from Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, the State University of New York, Brockport New York, and the Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts from Humboldt State University, California.