David Ortiz

David Ortiz, a native Californian, and youngest of 5 children, was raised in Mexicali Baja California, Mexico. He entered San Diego City College, before studying traditional painting at Middlesex University (New Jersey). He returned to San Diego to continue his arts studies at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), where he started a Japanese language curriculum, immersing himself in Japanese culture, specifically Sumi-e painting and Japanese cinema (1949-1987), and spent a semester at kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata City, Japan. Upon returning to the United States he continued to explore the artistic media such as video arts, painting and Internet based arts. In 2003 he received a B. A in Visual and Performing Arts and Technology, Deans List. His video work focuses on incorporating traditional visual techniques with novel approaches to still photography. In painting he explores surrealism, using Japanese painting techniques with modern acrylic media, infusing interest in his Mexican cultural heritage.

I think of my work as unfinished inventories of fragmented ideas expressed as objects and lines. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the ready-made are used to question our making of the world through vision in the language of knowledge.

My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation in space and time. I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction. The work thus far has used the frame of the museum idea to propose a secret of modernity, and in the process, I point to stereotypes of difference, in which are hidden in plain sight.

I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The paintings I make are placed in modernist art, in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicism of the art.