Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University presents Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York. A Mexican artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles, Rubén Ortiz-Torres shares a critical, cosmopolitan, technically inventive, and intellectually comic visual practice that explores the cultural paradoxes of our globalized world through the informed convergence of popular and modernist art traditions. Examining recent histories, sometimes disassembling their chronologies or ideologies, Ortiz-Torres recontextualizes and remakes well-known iconographies by collapsing their hierarchies.

When he quotes a scene, Ortiz-Torres redistributes the individual signifiers within it. He takes artistic license and does not claim autonomous authorship yet emphatically claims originality. His radically personal desire for artistic freedom is served by his astute sense of history, whether compiling the outward-looking cacophonous collages of his tile murals or rendering the likenesses of friends on plates, hunting down and photographing Machu Picchu murals in Peruvian restaurants, or making a strange marriage between damaged Tijuana police cars and feminist “glitter” protests. His is an intense practice of observations and internalizations—of social relationships, historical notes, and passions. 

From fall 2023 to summer 2024, Ortiz-Torres took up residence in Guadalajara to collaborate with traditional ateliers. Soon after, the house where he was residing was robbed, and a few months after that, his neighbor was murdered at the print shop where he worked. These encounters with the city’s raw violence are rendered in drawings on plates based on the CCTV footage of the suspects and tilework adaptations of wanted posters plastered throughout the neighborhood. This series, El Corrido de Leandro Valle (2023), offers visual versions of corridos, a traditional genre of Mexican ballads often associated with the experiences of working-class groups or stories about the daily life of criminals, oppression, or history. 

Ortiz-Torres’s work borrows from myriad sources and re-situates cultural symbols and sentiments to bridge disparate references. He gets inside the realities these iconographies represent and locates their emotional registers. The chaotic imagery in two tile murals, Apocalypse Now (2024) and Para todo mal (2024), is derived from depictions in mass media of current wars and ongoing conflicts—tanks in Ukraine, a destroyed mosque in Gaza, ruined apartment buildings, missiles, and the US/Mexico border wall in Tijuana. Constructed as if a mélange of converging corridos, these works feed on the destructive forces in the news that comprise our daily diet of crisis and collapse. The artist’s seeming obsession with originals and copies, re-creations, and quotations, resuscitates instances of history and cultural objects that could have easily gotten lost in the sea of images and events we regularly navigate. Appropriation and simulacra are mobilizing tools for his artmaking. 

American Graffiti, an animation and related prints, is a tribute to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 82-foot fresco mural, América Tropical: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism, created in 1932, for an exterior wall of the Italian Hall in Los Angeles. The central figure, an Indigenous man on a cross, was obscured in the original proposal and sparked outrage when the completed work was revealed. The mural was whitewashed soon after. Ortiz-Torres’s intervention into this history begins with an extant black and white image of the mural that slowly becomes obliterated by graffiti and street art in varied styles until the image is transformed into a white blank. 

What catches the artist’s eye and attention is seared into his material objects. Los Angeles and Guadalajara are at the nexus—and what these cities offer seeps into each of his projects, offering direction for what should be said, what can be done, and what can be made.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración is the third installment of the Wallach Art Gallery’s By One series curated by Betti-Sue Hertz. Previous artists were Autumn Knight and Angela Su.