Dotted Eye

The offset-printed CMYK "rosette".

Continuing about Damián Ortega. Creator of many suspended works, "Champ de Vision" wins the Obsessive Art Award in my book. He hung over 6,000 threads of acrylic dots in Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, in the vein of offset printing technology. The strands layer to create, from a distance, the image of an open eye, effectively simulating the rosetta of color printing. It's a magnificent work of art and the fact that the viewer can walk through it makes it all the more powerful.

The acrylic "dots" that
make up the eye.

For someone like me that was first exposed to the Sunday comics by a magnifying glass, I studied the make-up of the colors, never at that time imagining that I would work as a printer for a significant part of my life. In fact, for several years I worked at Quad Graphics where, of all things, I looked at color proofs and equalled them to the color originals from whence they came.

Enough from that dust bin of memories. [I've borrowed the expression from Roger Tatley, a former Editor-in-Chief of Modern Painters Magazine, whose Production Manager I was.]

Mr. Ortega's work is magical. While I've never seen it, just the immersive nature of the piece is alluring. From an email interview he gave in 2004:


"I want him/her to become an integral part of the piece from the inside. At the same time, there is a darkened area at one end of the room for the spectator to establish a different kind of relationship with the piece, to see it from another point of view. From there, the perspective is more synthetic, condensed, immaterial and illusory."

Here you can see the layering of
the strands to form the density
of color.

A little further, he writes about another of his pieces, but I think follows well to what he wrote above:

"It is about a glance that can never grasp the absolute perspective of things...To name is to convert things into a system of words, images and ideas. Reality is outside, and the brain replaces living creature and converts them into the brain's reality. What I'm trying to do in Champ de Vision is to focus the attention--and the moment--incite consciousness to concentrate on the fact of seeing.

"I try to generate a perceptual and sensorial happening. What you find on one side of the exhibition space is a codified, abstract incomprehensible system, yet built with elements and materials whose physical presence is undeniable. In the other part of the room you will face a vision...something fictions and unreal, though identifiable: the representation. Art is not just an 'object', it is a 'work', which implies a system of relations. In this system, the object stops being something already known and becomes new knowledge".

To see the entire interview, please visit bit.ly/1b4yoDj. Ortega, who worked for years as a journalist and political illustrator in Mexico, expresses his ideals and ideas fluently. The interview touches upon other topics often written about in this blog.

What I'm curious about is: when does the viewer get to see the Eye? Before entering or upon leaving?