120 giornate, Damián Ortega, 2002

In occasione della VII edizione di Art to Art, il curatore Vicente Todolì ha invitato Damián Ortega ad esporre nell’Enopolio di Poggibonsi "120 giornate”, variazioni sul tema prodotte su suo progetto dagli artigiani del cristallo locali.

"(...) The artist transforms objects and situations with irreverence, but without reducing the meaning of his work to a single vision. Thus, a reality emerges, marked by an ironic and playful gaze, capable of creating a short circuit where even terribly serious issues seem, at the same time, profoundly ridiculous.

By emphasizing the uselessness, another sense emerges, another level detached from the narrow logic of production: the discard occurs by making seemingly marginal aspects the protagonists, as in the case of a very recent photographic series where the artist portrays plants capable of growing by carving out a vital space between the cracks of the asphalt.

In occasione di Art to Art,  Ortega ha scelto di confrontarsi con l’immagine nota in tutto il mondo della bottiglia della Coca-Cola, le cui forme sinuose riprendono la silhouette del corpo femminile. Vera e propria icona del mondo dei consumi, tale bottiglia ha attraversato il XX secolo mantenendo intatta la sua popolarità: celebrata o considerata simbolo da abbattere a seconda dei punti di vista, entrata a pieno titolo nell’iconografia dell’arte contemporanea, tra gli esempi più noti le riproduzioni di Andy Warhol e le Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos dell’artista brasiliano Cildo Meireles, dove l’artista, manipolando le etichette, inseriva un elemento critico all’interno del processo di circolazione delle merci.

Ortega exhibited his work at the Enopolio in Poggibonsi, placing the bottles on a shelf made of wooden planks running along the walls and the machines for bottling wine still present in the space: 120 variations on the theme produced by the artist himself based on his free project, partly involving his collaborators – the glassmakers of the Vilca factory – allowing them the freedom to imagine further variations. The artist introduces us to a universe of bizarre forms, where the standard requirements of contemporary industrial production, the recognizable shape that over time has become a symbol of safety and reliability for the consumer, are put into crisis. The bottles become human bodies, and the focus is on the relationships between the massified body and the interventions of craftsmanship manipulation, which includes the most varied treatments, from scarification practices to torture.

Starting from the title, 120 Giornate, which evokes the literary world of De Sade, Le 120 Giornate di Sodoma, but also Pasolini’s cinematic adaptation, Ortega presents a world of the unexpected, where variations have been made on the bottles/bodies in relation to the original model, with distortions intended as transformations of one or another part of the body: the mouth, the neck, the skin, the organs, the union, the monsters, the body as a battlefield."

Vicente Todolì, Art to Art VII, 2002