BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 26, 2009
Ghoulish figures haunt the square canvas, the emaciated bodies searching across a desolated earth. A sandy-blonde beauty peers over a rock, her long wispy hair swirling past the edge. A man and woman sit face-to-face, breathing curls of smoke into a bleak, blue sky.
The oil-on-cloth images are part of Mexican artist Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio's introspective look into self-identity, self-discovery and the human consciousness. Her paintings are on display now through Sept. 30 as part of her "Individuación: Reflexiones" ("Individuation: Reflections") exhibition at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City's historical center.
The 12-piece collection forms the 23-year-old artist's premiere exhibit in Mexico and follows her first-ever formal show held earlier this summer at the Visual Arts Gallery in San Diego.
She created most of the artwork as part of her undergraduate thesis at the University of San Diego, from which she graduated this spring.
Ortiz-Rubio said her hometown debut was even more nerve-wracking than her California show.
"This matters so much more to be because it's my city, my country, and I care more about what the people here think - my family is here, my friends, my peers.the artists that I admire the most are from Mexico," she said last week in an interview before the exhibit's Aug. 19 inauguration.
EXPRESSIONS OF REFLECTION
The somber, symbolic and expressive paintings represent reflections of the intellectual, spiritual and emotional human experiences that form our individual and collective identities, according to a Sor Juana press release. The exhibit's goal is to encourage visitors to reflect on their own individuality.
The artist said that as a child, she began to discuss such abstract themes with her mother, Paulina López Portillo, the daughter of former President JosAc López Portillo.
"We always talked about those essential questions: 'Who am I?' 'Why am I?' and therefore, 'Who are you?'" said Ortiz-Rubio, who grew up in Mexico, Italy and the United States.
"That's always been at the core of everything I've decided to study. I've always had that in me," she added.
"What fascinates me is that we are so incredibly unique and different, but, at the same time, we are able to experience the world through these same emotions and reactions. There is nothing foreign to us because we are all humans."
Tucked away in Sor Juana's Sotocoro, the former shrine of San Jerónimo, the large-scale paintings hang above ornate gold altars and between spiraling pillars. Ortiz-Rubio's images range from haunting, unsettling and uncomfortable to peaceful, beautiful and perfectly placid.
Her 2009 piece "Maya," for example, shows a group of naked men and women wandering desperately through the desert, their eye sockets purple and their ribcages nearly exposed. A woman in the background falls to her knees and cries out to the sky as a man in the foreground gasps for air.
An untitled 2008 painting, on the other hand, reveals a more tranquil approach. A longhaired woman dutifully knits herself together from bits of thread, a pale pink sky highlighting the endless tangled heaps of strings surrounding her.
"Vertigo y vacío" ("Vertigo and Emptiness"), a 2008 piece, illustrates a naked woman standing atop an isolated rock. She nervously peeks down over the edge, her preoccupied expression framed by billowing hair that falls past her feet.
"I use the human figure, and I try to make the images seem timeless, because it is an exploration of the human being as a whole, not in a specific moment in time or place," the artist said.
She added that the men are always bald, the woman always with long hair and the figures are mostly nude to erase any cultural references from the image.
The landscapes are typically desolate and isolated to create a "moment of transition or conflict, of new consciousness, of understanding who we are," she said.
Several paintings hint at a self-portrait construction, the illustrated woman mirroring Ortiz-Rubio's sandy blonde waves and finer facial features.
A 2008 piece "Saudade" ("Longing") shows a similarly featured woman in a rumpled white dress clutching the remnants of a shattered ceramic plate, the broken shards scattered across an empty field.
In the 2007 piece "Encuentro" ("Encounter"), a fair-haired woman emerges from a large clay pot, her body and neck craning upward to look into the eyes of her pale reflection.
"The images come from my process of exploring as part of defining myself and trying to understand what is the human being without all these restrictions that society puts on us," she said.
"It's therapeutic, but it has also been very intense, because through this exploration, I have definitely realized all those aspects of who I am that I didn't put there, that society, family or all these institutions have put there."
"So, it has also not only been a reconstruction of the self, but a deconstruction as well," she added.
The young artist counts among her most prominent influences artists like Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and JosAc Clemente Orozco, as well as Spanish-Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo, whose simple images are filled with symbols and meanings, and Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum for his use of light and alternative images.
Ortiz-Rubio resides in San Diego and plans to stay in the city or move around the United States. She is also the founder and co-president of Basement Society, a community arts group in the city.
She previously worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and has volunteered with the local organization A.R.T.S (A Reason to Survive).
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