ORTEGA’S ART A BRIGHT SPOT IN HARD TIMES
Tony Ortega brings color, and a sense of community, to Denver Botanic Gardens’ new galleries
The colorful paintings and prints of Tony Ortega at the new Denver Botanic Gardens galleries are a bright spot in the city’s otherwise dark and dismal visual arts scene of the past year.
The debut of the new, expanded galleries at the Denver Botanic Gardens has been a bright spot in the city’s otherwise dark and dismal visual arts scene of the past year.
Sure, museums and commercial galleries have been putting up exhibitions — on and off, as restrictions have allowed — but few shows managed to be particularly memorable or especially enlightening during this endless pandemic.
Even big events — like DAM’s Frida Kahlo extravaganza or the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at the Museum of Outdoor Arts — have felt lacking during the present public health crisis when mandatory mask-wearing has prohibited viewers from really breathing into the art experi
ence, and limits on crowd size have transformed formerly-fun opening celebrations into static, virtual anti-events.
But I experienced genuine joy walking into the Tony Ortega exhibition that just opened in full force at DBG. With Ortega’s colorful paintings and prints bouncing off the walls and into my hungry brain, there was a palpable sense of the beforetimes in the room. I was art-happy for the first moment since March.
A few things added up to this sensation, starting with the gallery itself. It’s sparkling clean and airy and one of four climate-controlled exhibition halls that DBG included in the $40 million Freyer-Newman Center, which debuted on the gardens’ York Street campus in September. For a science institution to devote so much physical space to art demonstrates a real understanding of how the two sides of our brain can power simultaneously to magnify our humanity. The galleries serve as an invitation for people of all entertainment appetites to feast together.
It also helped that it was snowy and cold and the indoor galleries offered a sensation of warmth amid the gardens’ mostly outdoor experience. Because of the pandemic, DBG’s main winter wonder, the glass-enclosed Tropical Conservatory, is closed until further notice, leaving Freyer-Newman as the only place where you can legitimately remove your mittens (if not your face covering, for now).
Ultimately though, it was Ortega’s work that brought it all together. Ortega has established himself as a crucial figure in Denver visual arts; he’s been making, showing and selling art here for a while now, capturing the scenes and spirit of Chicano culture present and past. His objects are familiar, dependable, pleasant to be around in troubled times.
No artist, of course, wants to be thought of as cultural comfort food, and I position him that way with the full understanding that, after all these paintings, he has emerged as an important influencer in how the city sees itself, and as an artist with something to say.
In this show, titled “Raíces y ramas,” which translates into “roots and branches,” he says it through prints, paintings and pastel works capturing images of contemporary Latino life.
The scenes focus on people, but mostly outside and in the context of their urban landscape, making them appropriate fare for the sprawling DBG, which is the mother of all urban landscapes.
Ortega has a talent for making things seem real and unreal at the same time. By that I mean his groupings of human figures -- hanging out on front porches and park benches, riding bikes or playing musical instruments — feel authentic. They’re doing the real things people do in the 21st century and, notably, they are brown people with dark hair, unmistakably Latino, and taking part in the rituals of everyday Latino life.
But Ortega keeps them enigmatic by leaving out their eyes, noses and mouths. As individuals, they are incomplete.
Sometimes Ortega does get close to presenting fully realized people. In “Una bicicleta para dos,” (“A Bicycle for Two”) a work that mixes acrylic paint and collage and depicts a male and female figure sharing a bike, one figure sports an actual mustache, the other a pair of gold hoop earrings. But Ortega holds back on the facial details.
Same goes for the collage mix “Dos Beans,” which presents another couple (and whose title disempowers the word “bean” as a derogatory term for Mexicans) that presents the male figure with a headband and the female figure with what appears to be her thumb in her mouth. They are full of personality, anticipation, motion, yet still they have no lips or nostrils or brows; you couldn’t actually recognize them as friends or neighbors.
The mystery serves Ortega’s purpose well. He means to paint a community here, to capture a culture via its aggregate charms rather than by putting the spotlight on any particular mortal who might overshadow the group effect. The figures in his pieces are symbols.
His skill is to keep them empathetic at the same time, and that he accomplishes by presenting people in groups, instead of alone, so there is an unmistakable and connected experience among them. They relate to each other as human beings who share a particular space and time, and so, as viewers, we can relate to them ourselves.
There’s an energy to the work, heightened by Ortega’s indulgence in color. In “Un descanso” (“A Break”), for example, four characters rest together around a bench. They have similar skin tones but they are decked out in purple blouses and green shoes, bright blue skirts and jeans, yellow hats and visors. Ortega has added doses of orange, pink and magenta in the background.
These are the brilliant hues of Mexico, exaggerated by the standards of European painting traditions but right at home in the folk art, architecture, food, clothing and customs of the country just south of here. And with Ortega’s paintings, that is best said with an exclamation point: Mexico!
He captures a moment in time and, on a grander scale, one of the great periods of human migration of our history. It’s quite a feet considering his subjects are doing nothing more than strolling down streets or eating ice cream.
But there they are, these people, right at home. In the middle of Denver, in the middle of a giant garden, in the middle of winter.