RUBÉN ORTIZ-TORREZ AND THE CULTURAL PARADOXES OF THE GLOBALIZED WORLD

A Mexican artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles, Rubén Ortiz-Torres shares a critical, cosmopolitan, technically inventive, and intellectually comic visual practice that explores the cultural paradoxes of our globalized world through the informed convergence of popular and modernist art traditions. Examining recent histories, sometimes disassembling their chronologies or ideologies, Ortiz-Torres recontextualizes and remakes well-known iconographies by collapsing their hierarchies.

When he quotes a scene, Ortiz-Torres redistributes the individual signifiers within it. He takes artistic license and does not claim autonomous authorship yet emphatically claims originality. His radically personal desire for artistic freedom is served by his astute sense of history, whether compiling the outward-looking cacophonous collages of his tile murals or rendering the likenesses of friends on plates, hunting down and photographing Machu Picchu murals in Peruvian restaurants, or making a strange marriage between damaged Tijuana police cars and feminist “glitter” protests. His is an intense practice of observations and internalizations—of social relationships, historical notes, and passions.

The city’s raw violence are rendered in drawings on plates based on the CCTV footage of the suspects and tilework adaptations of wanted posters plastered throughout the neighborhood. This series, El Corrido de Leandro Valle (2023), offers visual versions of corridos, a traditional genre of Mexican ballads often associated with the experiences of working-class groups or stories about the daily life of criminals, oppression, or history.

Ortiz-Torres’s work borrows from myriad sources and re-situates cultural symbols and sentiments to bridge disparate references. He gets inside the realities these iconographies represent and locates their emotional registers. The chaotic imagery in two tile murals, Apocalypse Now (2024) and Para todo mal (2024), is derived from depictions in mass media of current wars and ongoing conflicts—tanks in Ukraine, a destroyed mosque in Gaza, ruined apartment buildings, missiles, and the US/Mexico border wall in Tijuana. Constructed as if a mélange of converging corridos, these works feed on the destructive forces in the news that comprise our daily diet of crisis and collapse. The artist’s seeming obsession with originals and copies, re-creations, and quotations, resuscitates instances of history and cultural objects that could have easily gotten lost in the sea of images and events we regularly navigate. Appropriation and simulacra are mobilizing tools for his artmaking.

American Graffiti, an animation and related prints, is a tribute to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 82-foot fresco mural, América Tropical: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism, created in 1932, for an exterior wall of the Italian Hall in Los Angeles. The central figure, an Indigenous man on a cross, was obscured in the original proposal and sparked outrage when the completed work was revealed. The mural was whitewashed soon after. Ortiz-Torres’s intervention into this history begins with an extant black and white image of the mural that slowly becomes obliterated by graffiti and street art in varied styles until the image is transformed into a white blank.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración Will be on display until March 16, 2025, at The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts 615 West 129th Street, New York (United States).