Damián Ortega, Moby Dick, 2004. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio.
Stepping into Damián Ortega's solo exhibition Casino (curated by Vicente Todolí) at Milan's HangarBicocca, viewers may feel that they have entered into a dark and unusual four-dimensional universe, dotted with bright frozen explosions. The atmosphere inside the "Shed" of the Milanese art venue -- founded by renowned Italian tire company Pirelli in 2004 -- is at first glance inscrutable and overwhelming. The space appears as the theater of a few cosmic conflagrations, suspended in the midst of their explosive course. Yet there's no trace of actual stars, galaxies and planetary collisions here; rather gears, tools and mechanical elements dominate the room, as the two main installations in the exhibition - Cosmic Thing (2002) and Controller of the Universe (2007) - reveal.
Damián Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio.
Cosmic Thing, first shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale, comprises a dissected 1989 Volkswagen Beetle. Like something halfway between a post-autopsy mechanical corpse and a motorcar supernova, the installation presents an exploded view of the individual components of the original car, each part hung from the ceiling and suspended at regular intervals. The Beetle is an iconic object, and very connected to the history of Mexico, the country where Ortega was born and still lives. One of the first economical cars available on the Mexican market (the artist himself has owned one for years), the Beetle inspired a lucrative black market for replacement parts (the installation, indeed, might also resemble the showcase of a Mexico City garage for the illegal trading of spare parts). Ortega made the work in 2002, the year when the car went out of production: the piece reflects on the relationship between icons, obsolescence and popular culture.
Damián Ortega, Escarabajo, 2005. Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.
The entire "Beetle Trilogy", of which Cosmic Thing constitutes the first "act," is on view at HangarBicocca. The center of the gallery is occupied by a Beetle with grease-smeared wheels, and a few ropes and musical equipment -- the remains of Ortega's well-known performance Moby Dick (2004). The action, which took place the day of the opening of the show, saw the artist involved in a physical battle against the machine, while a band played the song of the same name by Led Zeppelin. The car roared across a layer of grease as Ortega, making use of ropes and pulleys, tried to tame it: the reference to the huge white whale from Melville's novel is clear. A 16-minute film (Escarabajo, 2005) is the last installment of the trilogy. The protagonist of the video is, again, the Beetle, taking an epic voyage to return to its place of origin: Puebla, one of the last locations where that automobile model was still produced. The final scene shows the artist, aided by a few people, burying the Beetle upside-down, like an undefended insect. If Cosmic Thing, in a sense, evokes the birth of the Volkswagen car, with its single mechanical fragments exposed like in an instruction sheet for assembling it, Escarabajo conjures up its death -- the end of the engaging lifecycle of an iconic product.
Damián Ortega, "Casino," installation view, 2015. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio.
Controller of the Universe (2007), displayed next to the dissected Beetle, emphasizes the sense of arrested cosmic explosion that pervades the exhibition. The installation appears as a deflagration of a load of old-fashioned work tools -- saws, pickaxes and hammers -- suspended in mid-air through wires. Viewers can enter this eerie galaxy of objects from four different entrance points. Inspired by the mural that Diego Rivera painted for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (a depiction of a utopian technocratic society, ruled by skillful and capable men), the title provocatively overturns the humanistic meaning that it would seem to suggest. If one looks at the threatening tools that compose the installation, it's hard to think of man as Measure-of-All-Things or Master-of-the-World; instead, these technological prosthesis, crafted by human beings in order to better control nature, would seem to oppress and crush against them. Suspension, or the interruption of gravity, is a trick dear to Ortega: not only does it allow him to turn things into menacing entities, but also to give the ordinary an extraordinary allure. Just think of one of his most recent gravity-defying installations, Cosmogonía Doméstica, presented at Museo Jumex in 2013, where an array of domestic objects -- chairs, utensils, teapots and a table -- spun, suspended in the air, around five concentric circles on the floor: it resembled a house-hold solar system. Ortega's art possesses a strong imaginative power: as props from an Alice in Wonderland-like movie set, his works plunge the viewer into a fantastic, dreamlike microcosm.
Damián Ortega, Hollow/Stuffed: market law, 2012. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio.
This fairy-tale trait in Ortega's art is tempered and counterbalanced by an irreverent political vein. That is evident in Hollow/Stuffed: market law (2012), exhibited here in the Milan art space. Consisting of a suspended small-scale submarine made of plastic sacks and filled with salt, this majestic installation hints at the fecund cocaine trade managed by Mexican Narcos. A constant flow of salt pours out of the rear section of the sculpture, creating a cone-shaped heap on the floor. Destined to empty out, the depletion process stands as a metaphor for the moral "emptying" of contemporary man. A subtle political satire informs a few other works in the show: Prometeo (1992), a light bulb containing a candle, alludes to the energy crisis that hit Mexico during the 1990s, while the more recent Incidental Configuration (2013), a white plinth casting a shadow on the floor over small cubes of cement, reproduces the contrast between polished new buildings and dirty, degraded slums in South-American megalopolises. The combination of socio-political issues and dark humor originates from Ortega's former activity as a satirical cartoonist: between the late 1980s and early 1990s he satirized corrupt Mexican politicians in the pages of national newspapers.
Damián Ortega, Prometeo (Prometheus), 1992. Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.
Finally, a dedicated section in the exhibition brings together a number of small sculptures and objects featuring a deep conceptual strength. Informed by a Duchampian readymade aesthetic, works such as Pico Consado (1997) -- an anthropomorphized pickaxe fixed to the wall -- and Elote Clasificado (2005) -- a dry ear of corn on which the artist has enumerated every single kernel -- can be seen as a response to a certain European conceptual tradition. At the beginning of his career, Ortega, between 1987 and 1992, was a regular participant in the "Friday Workshops," a series of informal meetings organized once a week in the Tlalpan studio of Gabriel Orozco. There he discovered the most innovative artistic practices overseas and encountered Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, a book that would shape his work to come. That was a turning point for Ortega's art: the era of cartoons and vignettes was over, and his installation art -- for which today he is internationally renowned -- was on the horizon.
Damián Ortega, "Casino," installation view, 2015. Courtesy Fondazione HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio.
-Federico Florian