Álvaro Ortiz (1962), who signs as “Artiz”, is a Colombian artist residing in Canada. He studied art at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and at the same time he attended to workshops about drawing, composition, shadows, and light contrasts at the Taller de Arte La Buhardilla, in Bogotá. From that academic experience he began to make his first series of paintings and drawings that include nudes, birds of prey and still lifes.

Another art genre that Ortiz has passionately devoted time to is portraiture, which has a long tradition in Western art history. Although, in principle, the function of the portrait consists of the most realistic representation, as faithful as possible, of the physical features of a person, artists have tried to go further, to capture the psychology of the portrayed, their soul, their interior. In this regard, it is worth mentioning a maxim of Cicero, a Roman philosopher, who said that “the face is the mirror of the soul, and the eyes, its informers.” Similarly, in the configuration of a portrait, the sensibility of the artist also comes into play, who interprets the features according to their taste and the stylistic characteristics of the artistic movement or current of the historical context in which they live.

Ortiz approaches the portrait from contemporary aesthetics, imprinting pictorial value on his compositions, without ceasing to represent the maximum psychological expression of his characters, which he achieves through drawing, color and pictorial matter, acrylic, which he spreads with a brush and spatula, creating surfaces rich in stains, splashes, and textures. In his creative process he begins in a fortuitous, gestural, spontaneous way, from the stain, until he achieves the figure. Ortiz fuses styles such as abstract expressionism with defined figuration. Their faces, perfect finished images, emerge from spots of color among which they are confused and allow themselves to be glimpsed.

José Gregorio Noroño