Darío Ortiz’s “Retratos del cuerpo” An Exhibit Beyond Painting and Skin

Darío Ortiz’s “Retratos del cuerpo” An Exhibit Beyond Painting and Skin
Santo Domingo, December 8 2015

The Ministry of Culture, in coordination with the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), opened the exhibit “Retratos del Cuerpo” (Portraits of the Body), by Colombian artist Darío Ortiz, which consists of more than 40 pieces, including paintings and drawings.

In her opening remarks, María Elena Ditrén, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, emphasized that for Darío Ortiz the portraits of the body are metaphors, symbols and “social and personal demands against the culture of consumption.” These are exquisite visual exercises, which highlight the beauty of the naked bodies, free from any subliminal content, to highlight, in their imperfect authenticity, his disinterest in today’s stereotyped models and implausible aesthetic canons.

About the exhibit, Amable López Meléndez, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, explained that the curatorial proposal is articulated through two clearly defined collections: “The first group is defined by a series of context (group) compositions where the vital and performative representation of the body and its characteristics unleash a profuse and suggestive metaphorical potential; while the second group includes a series of pieces in which the artist portrays himself chatting with his models in the workshop.”

Referring to his work, Darío Ortiz stated that “the discovery of the body, beyond the object of desire, with all its social and personal demands against a culture of consumption, is really what exemplifies our time and it is what allows and justifies the works of artists such as Lucien Freud, Jenny Saville or Odd Nerdrum, just to mention painters, because it is an artist’s duty with his time to reveal what is invisible.

“It is in this context that my work is framed, from portraying the artificial beauties created by surgeons and challenged in the aesthetic archetypes and myths of the classical world, including the Bible, painted for more than a decade, up to the portraits of the ordinary bodies of the people that surround me, as a remarkable selfie, where each of them is shown as is: without academic pretensions or poetic twists and exaggerations, or critical caricatures that succumb to the verbal pomposity,” he said.

Darío Ortiz was born in Ibague-Tolima, Colombia, on September 12, 1968. He has participated in a hundred collective exhibitions in over 20 countries, and in more than 30 solo exhibitions in Italy, the United States, France, Austria, Slovakia, China, South Korea, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico and Colombia.

Among his most recent solo exhibitions are those at the Mainz Museum, Argentina; the Rayo Museum in Roldanillo, Colombia; the Guan Xiang Art Gallery in Seoul, South Korea (2010); the Shangdu Art Museum in Zhengzhou, China (2011); the Armenia and the Quindío Museum, Colombia (2014); “Retratos del Cuerpo” at the Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez Museum, Toluca, Mexico; and, El espejo y la mascara (The mirror and the mask) at the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato, Mexico (2015).

“Retratos del Cuerpo” will be open to the public until January 31, 2016, on the first floor of the Museum of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic, located at Ave. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Plaza de la Cultura Juan Pablo Duarte, Santo Domingo. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

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