Aitorortiz

Architecture sets the patterns for urban living. Literally. It creates the city labyrinths that determine our routes from home to shopping to work to home again. In addition, it defines the buildings themselves in which we live and work and that we pass trough. Not only is the building the “machine for living” as Le Corbusier put it, but it also has a socio-political function. Take a housing project: it should provide affordable housing and an encouraging, social environment for workers and their families to live, or, at least, to sleep in order that they do not become cannon fodder for revolutionaries. That was the political agenda behind much of the architecture and city planning from the late nineteenth century until the present day. On the other hand, there is the aspirational architecture of museums and great civic projects that try to give a city a positive image city and attract tourists who will benefit the local economy and boost local morale. The best example for this is the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao where the town fathers and the Basque regional administration placed a major bet on the power of architecture to save their city in northwest Spain. The new building designed by Frank Gehry has been a huge success and put Bilbao back on the map as a tourist destination and one of Spain’s cultural Meccas.

Aitor Ortiz was the photographer during the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He understands something about aspirational architecture and the enigmas behind the image of the structure. Ortiz’s art is not limited to the mere photographic representation of buildings. Rather, Ortiz, who has almost exclusively photographed in Bilbao, is interested in architecture as metaphor and as a sculptural space.

Ortiz does not photograph dead-on in order to produce an empty vision. His use of perspective is deeper despite the fact that, at first glance, his buildings seem empty and cut-off from human activity. More often, Ortiz picks angles, concave corners of buildings that draw the viewer into their implicit depth. Ortiz further manipulates his images by combining various details or optical impossibilities. He forces the viewer to wonder what is going on in these buildings. What is their potential? What is their purpose? Some may be recognizable—the Guggenheim—others are elsewhere in Bilbao.

Recognizability of buildings or various elements of buildings is at the heart of Ortiz’s work, yet he distorts the apparent truth factor of photography for his own artistic ends. His images from the series Destructoras (Destructions, 1999 to the present) are typically more than 1 x 2 meters and are produced in black and white. They contain uncanny lighting elements or other details that do not make rational sense. Ortiz’s computer-assisted skill enables him to transform the everyday, reified manifestations of politics—public buildings—into timeless enigmatic spaces more at home in science fiction movies than in actually lived spaces.

Ortiz notes that he deliberately extracts aspects of the real existing concrete structures, those architectural spaces, and transforms them into the symbolically “architectonic.” He writes, “It is impossible to tell which state these spaces are in, whether they are in a phase of construction or deconstruction, they transmit a spiritual quality inherent in the architectonic structure, the feeling that nothing can be added nor taken away of its eternity.”

Ortiz’s work uses our awareness of our circumstances. We know who we are, and we seem to recognize where we are. Yet for the artist, that is mere seduction. Ortiz’s images draw us into his own infinite universe filled with his own epigrammatic symbols. We think we know where we are, but we really don’t. We are in Ortiz’s own universe, in his own computer-generated but seemingly very familiar world, and we must reckon with it.