Bernardo Ortiz. Balance

01.02.20_24.04.20

Balance will be the third solo exhibition of Colombian artist Bernardo Ortiz (Cali, 1972) at Alarcón Criado. It is a site-specific exhibition that the artist presents in the gallery space, where he will bring together installation works, mural interventions, as well as a series of unpublished pieces executed on different supports and techniques. The exhibition precedes the presentation that will take place at ARCO Madrid 2020, where the artist will have an individual project in the Projects section, next to Alarcón Criado’s stand.

For years Bernardo Ortiz has stubbornly insisted that he makes “drawings about painting”. Drawings that revolve around the act of painting. Despite his warning, the border between the act of drawing and the act of painting is becoming increasingly tenuous and porous.

The exhibition is a staging of isolated gestures. For example: priming tissue paper with wax and oil to make it at the same time transparent and impermeable to ink; unnecessarily and artificially staining a found canvas; “recovering” old drawings with oil marks; portraying, from memory, distant encounters with color combinations that the artist calls “eccentric”; in short, gestures that have a contradictory condition, because although obviously deliberate, the gestures seem to respond to basic impulses, where marking, scratching, painting are ways of recovering something that is irremediably lost.