PIA ORTUÑO

In an ensemble of painting, sculpture and installation, Ortuño examines the relationship between industrial materials and decomposing metals with natural pigments, traditional mark-making, and ritualistic gestures. Through chisel marks that disrupt the surface, forming planes upon which the viewer’s eye can discover light and colour, the artist creates a choreography that ultimately records time.

The title of Ortuño’s present exhibition, Down to the Roots, recalls ideas of returning to a place of origin, the elemental forces of nature’s growth and decay, as well as the etymological root of words. To go back to the source. To start again. Ortuño, who was born in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, is constantly negotiating between her roots on the Caribbean Sea and the ever-expanding branches of decisions taken in her adulthood. These have seen her establish a new life in London as she splits her time between the capital and for long periods of time each year in Pietrasanta, a small Tuscan artisan town in the foothills of the Carrara marble mountains. While Ortuño’s works may seem to embody the ambiguous formal properties of pure abstraction they never lose their profound sense of communion with the underlying codes and patterns of nature, whether that be the imperfect curvatures of nests and seeds in her works in marble or the distinctly arboreal quality of the surface of her painted sculptures. In turn, both categories of works in this exhibition resemble the roots, dirt, soil, and perpetual renewal of trees, finding analogies in the timeless song of the oropendola bird and the way that the black lines or zone lines of frost rings collate information and stretch out in time.