Iliana Ortega
Flow of Radiance
by Joshua Sperling, May 10, 2025
Universe, 2010, from the series Las Imagenes Negras. Pigment print, pencil, and drill bit scratches on Hahnemühle photo paper, 40 x 50 inches
For many years at the start of her career Iliana Ortega eschewed the use of color. She had just arrived in New Haven from Guanajuato, in central Mexico, where she studied painting under Randy Waltz, a former assistant to Donald Judd. At Yale, for the first time in her life, Ortega stepped into the role of “Mexican female artist.” Color was expected, anticipated––and thus had to be denied. Wanting to be seen simply as an artist––a shocking proposition then and perhaps even more so now––Ortega embraced a form of nocturnal abstraction, working almost exclusively with pure black pigment, combining painting and drawing with low-light achromatic photography. In this precocious student work, spanning the series Las Imágenes Negras (2011), Depths of Black (2012), and Intangible Horizons (2013), one senses Ortega wanting to start from scratch, as if searching for the categorizing light switch of the world, or at least the art world, so as to turn it off. Color exists in broad daylight. For a time Ortega’s work seemed to emanate from a remote, unpolluted night.
Now well into her career, Ortega has moved through a range of materials and themes, and yet the early crisis she felt at Yale was perhaps formative. Though highly particular in its visual manifestation, the broader dilemma she faced is not unusual for racially marked artists who arrive, or are brought, from more peripheral social contexts to the institutional and metropolitan center. Once a diverse enough roster has been collected, whether at a school, gallery, or museum, each artist then faces a paradox, some more than others, and a choice: to what extent will my origins (publicly) define me? Am I now to speak, as might a representative, for my home district? No one calls James Turrell a white Quaker sculptor. For a time, Ortega may have been thought of as the Mexican artist who didn’t want to be thought of as a Mexican artist. She has sometimes joked about wanting to change her last name. “That’s why my process went completely black and more conceptual for a time,” Ortega has said. “I wanted to strip my work of any connotation that it was based on my national identity.”
In retrospect, what was most striking about Ortega’s particular solution to the burden of representation was not so much her avoidance of color as it was the rejection of critique. Instead of theatricalized irony and confrontation––a mode of art world performance that has become almost a readymade orthodoxy––Ortega set out on more elemental, poetic explorations, moving outward from perceptual minimalism to visual investigations of water, light, and distance. Ortega’s most recent series, Flow of Radiance (2025), indicates how far she has come along this path. Comprising several small (16 x 11 inches) watercolors on canvas, the set belongs to a lineage of layered, liquid abstraction that is also full of chromatic presence: seafoam greens and matted reds, pale ochre and Chagall blues. Abstraction has perhaps been the central throughline in Ortega’s work, from her first site-specific paintings in Guanajuato to the low-light minimalism of her composite photographs, but her recent series further develops the environmental quality latent in her prior formalism. As with Helen Frankenthaler’s “abstract climates” or what has been called Moira Dryer’s “soulful” or vernacular abstractions, Ortega’s formal motifs have never been far from the memories or afterimages of the natural world, whether of oceans, horizons, glaciers, or deltas. In Flow of Radiance, the thresholds of form are at once membrane-like and indecipherably vast, strangely atmospheric while also cellular and mitotic. They play on our perceptual cues while frustrating attempts at fixing their scale. In “Echos of Color,” a standout, the central dramatic duotone of juniper and dirty white evokes a triangular snow-capped mountain set against the sky-stain of ultramarine. This shape, however, is never fully defined; rather it takes shape, requiring both light and time. Throughout the series, colors seem to seep and float and eddy according to a tantalizing logic of accretion and erosion, alternately layered and dredged.
If abstraction has been the throughline in Ortega’s work, color was the long-repressed force always fated to return. For close to a decade Ortega lived in New York City, exhibiting in galleries and occupying a studio in the Lower East Side at the Clemente Soto Vélez cultural center. After a series of crises, including the loss of her studio, Ortega left New York for Hawaii during Covid. Her two years on the island proved to be a definitive pivot. Now back in New York, Ortega has left the city for East Hampton where she lives near the Krasner-Pollock house (though she insists the proximity is essentially a coincidence) and, crucially, the ocean. It was in Hawaii that she turned to watercolors. “The work comes alive in light,” Ortega has said about the form, “just like in a photograph.” Though we now associate camera-made images with a process that is essentially dry and digital, the earliest photosensitive plates, starting with Joseph Niépce’s view from his window, retain the chemical, acuarela-like roots of the medium. In this sense Ortega’s new work builds on the photography of her earlier experiments and more recent video installations which were often fluctuating and liquescent.
Perhaps those affordances we first renounce are set aside precisely to be rediscovered afresh, when we are ready to finally face them. Nowhere is this truer in Ortega’s case than the belated influence of Georgia O’Keefe. “The minute the brush hits,” Moira Dryer once said about her own work, “there is a fertile association to be made with paintings elsewhere.” The fertility of Ortega’s association with O’Keefe is manifest in the new watercolors. Somewhere behind the face of the icon and tourist attraction exists O’Keefe the painter––and Ortega has found her. It was the 2023 MoMA exhibition that, she says, was critical: “For a long time I didn’t like her work. I was like, sure––flowers. Then I saw it in person and oh my gosh, the paintings really communicate something very strong. An elegance.” The title of the MoMA exhibit also applies to Ortega: “To see takes time.”
Echos of Color, 2025, Watercolor on canvas, 16 x 11 inches
Beneath the Surface, 2025, Watercolor on canvas, 16 x 11 inches.
Voluptuous, floral, sensuous, vulval—someone should write an essay on all the descriptors used when discussing O’Keefe’s paintings. Or, for that matter, the postwar female abstractionists whose work clearly inspires Ortega. Such art critical tendencies oddly replicate the essentialized valence (and latent ambivalences) of Virginia Woolf’s notion of the “female sentence” from A Room of One’s Own. And yet, if Ortega continues to possess a vexed relation to her Mexican nationality, she is more receptive to an understanding of her work as intrinsically feminine (if not explicitly or reductively feminist), perhaps because, in her conception, womanhood is as much a universal-spiritual source of energy as it is a political category. In the age of pop feminism, best selling group biographies of women artists, and group exhibitions shaped around identity markers, Ortega sits uneasily among these trends. She at once belongs to certain traditions (there is a powerful history of Mexican acuarela much as there is of female abstraction) while simultaneously resisting them. Radically unaccompanied, her art returns us to the elements. It persists in a primordial space where time and light bring the world into being, before social categories condition our perceptions of that world.
As the German scholar Jochen Hörisch has reminded us: “Well into the nineteenth century, when one spoke of media, one typically meant the natural elements such as water and earth, fire and air.” In the twenty-first century perhaps the watercolor, one of the more ancient artistic media, is ripe for reconsideration along such elemental lines. Long considered decorative, the watercolor is in this sense comparable to weaving and the textile arts, for centuries marginalized as artisanal and feminine but now experiencing an astonishing critical renaissance. On her travels, Helen Frankenthaler famously turned to watercolors precisely because of their portability, making use of whatever was at hand. In literature, Alice Munro similarly took to the form of the short story (as opposed to the novel) because it could fit within the confines of her domestic tasks. Such postwar figures have been surely vindicated, just as once marginal forms are now lavished with recognition, even as formally similar prejudices continue to operate in plain sight.
Bigger is not always better, though Ortega has spoken recently of an interest in exploring larger work alongside her smaller or medium-sized compositions, once she reestablishes a studio practice. What Ortega is unlikely to turn to, however, is what has always been most expected of her. She has weathered a decade in which the art world preferred “super safe things,” as she put it, by which she means “work that matches exactly with identity.” Ortega has spoken of her almost physical incapacity to play that game: “I can try to paint my Virgenes de Guadalupes. But they just don’t come out. It feels off.” Meanwhile a more phenomenological conception of origins may be returning to her work. Until she was five, Ortega was taken by her grandmother to scavenge for edible mushrooms in the forests outside of Mexico City. The mystery and wonder of such early outings surely found their way into Flow of Radiance, even if that itinerary will likely be too complex and oneiric to satisfy the captivating reductions required for easy legibility.
Still, to Ortega’s credit and our benefit, we have the new color works. Moira Dryer once spoke of her art belonging to “a primal state, next door to dream and memory.” Ortega’s recent work takes up residence nearby, in a place where color flourishes and merges in the mind.
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Joshua Sperling is the author of A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger (Verso, 2018) which has been translated into many languages. He teaches at Oberlin College.
Three Footsteps, 2024
Watercolor on Arches Paper
5.5 × 9.5 inches