Pintura por metro [Peinture par metre]
Date:
1976 - 2000
Matériaux:
20 painted Gama canvases in wooden crate
Dimensions:
23 x 25 x 90cm
Catalogued:
Lucy + Jorge Orta, Light Works, Black Dog Publishing London 2010, p14
Exhibition history:
2010 Black Dog Space London
Courtesy:
Private Collection London
This work epitomizes the life of a painter in Rosario in the late 1970’s. Taking into account the limited taste and knowledge of contemporary expression amongst the petit-bourgeois, Jorge Orta has supplied a basic do-it-your-self painting in a box. According to the decoration scheme in your salon, you can choose to display any number of the paintings from a kit to pack neatly away when not required by social convention. The colours on the canvases are from the codifed Gama paint chart and in fact have a double meaning.
Created according to the specific context of Rosario, Argentina and across Latin America, the spectrum ranges from the cream and rose tinted bourgeois salon society, blind to the nauseating colors that permeated the everyday existence of life in Rosario. But what are so many colours for if people completely ignore art? Why sharpen their vision if so many people even prefer not to look. "I know nothing ... I did not see anything ... I was not there ... what do I care!" Orta says: We should democratize art, out of the museum, and mass distribute the ready-to-paint colour charts to young and old, troubadours and artisans, fat ladies and young people hungry for social justice.But, he has also created colours of hope, overflowing with shades of confidence for the future, scales and harmonies designed like a suspension bridge between reality and destiny, a colour therapy, for healing, for an urgent Founder Utopia.