Arts Weekend, October 4-6th, 2024

Raúl Ortiz

With a penchant for color and contrast, Ortiz combines a variety of different colors, patterns, and forms from multiple sources such as ethnographic patterns (Native American pottery and baskets; Islamic tiles; and Italian mosaics), architectural elements (antique vent/register covers; tin ceiling tiles; antique church stained glass windows, wallpaper, and African printed textiles), and botanical forms (florals – orchids, succulents, and most recently focusing on the rose). His finished paintings reflect a collage-like process of overlapping layering, obliterating, and refinement of images with decidedly contemporary color choices.

Raúl Ortiz is a Chicago-based painter inspired by architectural elements, color, pattern, and nature.  An active printmaker for over ten years, Ortiz’s current paintings reflect his practice (from printmaking) of layering, obliterating and gradually focusing/refining an image.  His compositions inform and unravel the images that spring out of his canvases as he adds to and peels away layers of paint.  While recent works are decidedly less descriptive, a series of works from a few years ago mirrored Monet’s water lily compositions but, in Ortiz’s studies, Giverny was the vegetation surrounding Lincoln Park’s north lagoon with its overhanging trees that cast light and shadow on the mirror-like waters.  , his work has always reflected a penchant for color and contrast.

Raul was born and raised in Ocampo, Guanajuato, Mexico until age five and then grew up in Chicago’s Little Village. He attended Columbia College as a photography student, but a year later transferred to the University of Illinois at Chicago, to study painting.  Under the tutelage of Rod Carswell, Julia Fish, and Kerry James Marshall he received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking in 2001.  He has since exhibited his work at the University Club of Chicago; the Evanston Art Center; the National Museum of Mexican Art; the Rockford Art Museum; the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit, Wisconsin; the Painting Center, New York; James May Gallery, Wisconsin; and the Meadows Gallery at the University of Texas.  Ortiz’s paintings can be found in many private and public collections throughout the United States.  Ortiz was an artist-in-residence at The Cliff Dwellers Chicago in 2005. 

Raul Ortiz, Composition 303, oil on canvas, 30×40
Raul Ortiz, Composition 259, oil on canvas, 30×40