La modelo de Bouguereau (2005) Painting by Dario Ortiz

Darío Ortiz painter and draftsman
By Alfredo Sigolo
Padova, Italy 2000

Darío Ortiz Robledo was born in Ibagué 31 years ago, but he can be considered almost Italian by adoption, due to his frequent stays in this country and his vast culture, especially in the field of art of our Renaissance. This is how the names of the great artists of the 500s and 600s are made for him. In the installation of the scene, in the drawing, in the choice of color, if not even in the subject matter, it is not difficult to see in the work the extraordinary love for the era of the golden ratio and the total dedication to the study of the techniques and the classical standard. The technical reference to tradition is so evident and emphatic in Ortiz that it makes us lose sight of an equally microscopic aspect of his art: that of being a reappropriation of the icnographic schemes of the Renaissance, of doctrine, of physiognomy and of the sacred order. But Ortiz's operation seems something very different from a simple summons variation. At the center of the artist's world is the man, Ortiz is in fact a painter of figures and self-portraits; Its scenes are populated by people who come from either the ancient world or the contemporary world: they live together and share the same space, but the distance between them is marked, more than by habits, by the veil of melancholy that invades the spaces. faces of today's men. It also happens that in some cases, and frequently happens to female figures, modern characters come to personify classical fierceness and sacredness in a subtle play of ambiguity, always conducted in an extremely lucid and solemn manner. In all the paintings the attention paid to the temporal factor is also evident, the actions are accompanied by slow, solemn rhythms, sometimes one has the impression that time has stopped, or that it has reversed its course.

Is that of the Colombian painter a pessimistic vision? Perhaps, but one has the feeling that behind melancholy is the hope of a reunion of man with the learning of sacred and emotional values ​​and, contextually, of the reconquest of time as a dimension that allows the recognition of oneself and one's feelings. reflections on life. That of Ortiz is not a simple tribute to antiquity, therefore, but beyond the call for a new humanism, we would say a “call to order”, if that did not imply precise historical references. Ortiz's path is traced: if his Man never manages to emerge victorious from the confrontation with the ancient, if he never detaches himself from the metaphysical place in which he finds himself and returns to the world (as Mitoraj's gods already did), we will perhaps have the “New Man of Ortiz”

• Nationality: COLOMBIA
• Date of birth : 1968
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Colombian Artists