Damián Ortega. "The rocket and the abyss"

Movement and suspension elements are often present in his work. From his beginnings as a caricaturist, Damián Ortega  retains a subtle irony, recognizable in many of his works in which he uses reality for critical comment. Inspired by Altazor or El viaje en paracaídas (1919), a poem by Vicente Huidobro,  El cohete y el abismo (The rocket and the abyss) is the title chosen by the artist for this exhibition of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which reflects the contradictory tension between the rise and fall, alluding to architecture and modern engineering history. Torre Latinoamericana, one of the works to be seen in the exhibition, takes its name from one of the tallest buildings in Mexico City; Titanic stars Monument; the great urban project Pruitt Igoe (St. Louis, Missouri, from 1954 to 1955), is the starting point of Yamasaki's thoughts.

In Torre Latinoamericana, the artist "revisits" one of the most representative examples of Mexican modern architecture, which had already been seen in his 2007 Torre Latino. Built between 1949 and 1956 by Augusto H. Álvarez and inspired by the Empire State Building (New York, 1930-1931), was for many years the tallest building in Mexico City and one of the tallest skyscrapers in an area of high seismic risk. On this occasion, Damian Ortega turns the tower into a pendulum, inverting and hanging it from a steel cable from the highest point of the Crystal Palace. The material that shapes the tower is printed skin, contrasting its flexibility and ductility to the very soundness of any architectural structure. The Tower is actually a large hourglass that draws on the ground its oscillating movement. The process of collecting the sand and refilling the receptacle is part of the project and recalls the work of Sisyphus, whose punishment forced him to push a large stone and again.

In Monument, the Titanic is set on a soft sculpture of canvas that measures thirteen meters, it is suspended from the ceiling as a puppet. On the canvas, the artist has designed the famous ship with crayon and plotter ink. The ship rushes on the floor with a careful gesture. In this way it makes us question its status of symbol and monument, and echoes the critical irony with which Claes Oldenburg' sculpture has redefined the possibilities of the monument in our time.

Thoughts of Yamasaki is an installation composed of numerous screenprinted items with images and texts that the artist has found during his investigation of the Pruitt-Igoe urban project, as well as objects that allude to the memory of those who inhabited the building complex by Architect Minoru Yamasaki, also author of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. It hailed as one of the most relevant public housing postwar urban projects in the United States, Pruitt-Igoe was built at a time of economic optimism, revealing itself, however, as a big disappointment for its rapid decline: in the seventies, thirty-three buildings were demolished by decision of the federal government, becoming the paradigm of the failure of modern architecture.

Damián Ortega's proposal is a fiction based on this event. The artist takes some phrases from historical sources to develop a historical narrative that fables  architect Minoru Yamasaki's reaction  at the destruction of his buildings. The piece is an experiment of the dialogue established between texts, in which are recognizable some Gilles Lipovetsky's expressions, author of the vacuum (1983), and objects acquired in second-hand markets. The artist tries to recreate the glamour of recycled advertising materials of the time, contrasting the seduction of consumption with the obsolescence of objects by the inexorable passage of time.