Justin Duyao on Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio
y llega siempre (detail), 2018, charcoal on white wall, Bread & Salt, San Diego, CA
[Image description: A closeup of a choppy, white cloud against a stormy black sky.]
I am never nastier than I am with myself while I write. Anywhere else, I’m not nasty at all. In a get-to-know-you game I played with my coworkers this week, I told them the quality I value most in other people is generosity—or, better, the ability to sidestep one’s own wants and needs for the good of another. Self sacrifice, hospitality. The stuff the world needs more of. And yet the nastiness that gathers like a black cloud over my head as I sit before my own words is the exact opposite. It’s ruthless perfectionism, unforgiving self criticism—in essence, the least generous version of myself I’ve ever met. I’m sure you know the extremes we go to in our wars with ourselves.
In Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio’s early figurative paintings, I recognize the kind of writing I’ve written and rewritten several times until it was exactly right. In the end, these pieces of mine follow all the rules of good writing; but the more I edit, the less the finished product feels like me. It seems Ortiz-Rubio’s early work was filtered through a similar process.
Blind Sight II, 2013, oil on wood, 23.5 x 17.75 in.
[Image description: A person with lights skin and dark hair presses a sheet of bubble wrap over their face, their nose and cheeks squished into the material.]
Completed as part of her MFA thesis in 2013, the series of early paintings are carefully detailed and exact, often photorealistic. Throughout her exploration of metaphorical blindness, she depicts bodies in anguish with disquieting accuracy. While some sit with closed eyes, small clouds hovering before their faces, others press bubble wrap over their noses and mouths, their faces obscured through the material.
“I was interested in bubble wrap because it is used to preserve—or care for—delicate, precious things, even as the same intention can stifle and suffocate and blind you,” Ortiz-Rubio told me.
The message of this early series is clear: We destroy ourselves. Though it may be society’s fingers that wrap around our throats, we are the ones, sometimes, who squeeze them tighter. These pieces participate in an important conversation, but they also reproduce, in their execution, the same problem they expose. Through the filter of her own perfectionism, Ortiz-Rubio perfectly illustrates its effect on the body.
*
In early high school, I caught my mom thumbing through my journal. I had been writing at the kitchen counter that afternoon and stepped away for a moment, only to return to her peering over the scraps of my most vulnerable and unedited self. Naturally, I was furious. I was humiliated. I also stopped journaling after that. Essentially, this event was the birth of my inner self critic, who from then on assumed everything I put on the page was being watched, judged, criticized.
It wasn’t until going through a breakup several years later that I finally sat down and began writing for myself again. A breakup may seem like a shallow reason to return to writing, but by then, I’d become such a clam around other people that writing was the only remotely safe place to unleash what I was feeling.
I’ve only looked back at that writing once, and I’m not sure I ever will again. It’s dramatic and self indulgent—trapped, really, in the moment I wrote it. In it, there’s no self reflection. And yet it is probably the most important thing I’ve ever put on the page. It is myself, in my most boundless form.
*
On the first day of Ortiz-Rubio’s artist residency at Bread & Salt Gallery in San Diego, CA, in 2018—five years after she exhibited her series of oil paintings—she received word that her daughter had been diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects the nervous system. The diagnosis meant her child would need to be cared for by her parents for the rest of her life. Over the course of three months, Ortiz-Rubio slashed and smeared charcoal on the white walls of a gallery space, depicting undulating hills of clouds that hover beneath an expanse of black universe.
y llega siempre, 2018, charcoal on white wall, Bread & Salt, San Diego, CA
[Image description: A panoramic mural that covers the walls of a long room, floor to ceiling, depicts an undulating sea of clouds.]
“My daughter’s diagnosis of Angelman’s syndrome, that really shook me to my core and forced me to reapproach my work in a completely different way,” Ortiz-Rubio said in a 2021 interview. “I was feeling a lot of massive things at the moment. So it kind of fit. I wasn’t very sure of what I wanted to do in there, I just knew I wanted to work on the walls themselves, directly.”
If her earlier work models a restrained and meticulous attention to detail, this later, bolder work, titled y llega siempre: (“and it always comes”), embodies an entirely new creature—unleashed, it seemed, from under Ortiz-Rubio’s own self critic. From the perspective in the mural, far above the clouds, there is no world beneath. Not a shred of it. There are only Ortiz-Rubio’s volcanic plumes of white, rivers and oceans of torrent. For many, clouds are the stuff of daydreams, soft pillows of possibility. For Ortiz-Rubio, clouds are a sharp, pale, unfeeling mass—powerful and wholly unforgiving.
Reflecting on the piece in a more recent interview, she said “that day, it was like another person, another artist, came out, and that’s been very liberating.”
Lunes por la mañana, 2022, graphite on paper, 9.5 x 8.75 in.
[Image description: In what looks like an enlarged ink blot, a black material spreads and, in thinner areas, flakes, like cooling lava rock.]
Since then, her work has only evolved further. Light Cones, her newest exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, represents nearly a half decade of diving deeper into the space between certainty and uncertainty, figuration and chaos. In Lunes por la mañana (“Monday in the morning”) a form crackles into being like a chemical fire, transforming graphite on paper into a scab of scorched earth. Its edges break off like rogue islands into the sea, while through it, caverns are carved like the fingers of rivers, and blotches of shapes bubble to the surface. Somehow, the piece feels both ancient and alive.
Cuando llegaste, 2022, graphite and charcoal on polypropylene paper, 12 x 9 in.
[Image description: A side-view of a storm cloud, pillowy and dense, is brightly illuminated on the top and dark on the bottom.]
In Cuando llegaste (“When you came”), Ortiz-Rubio experiments with graphite on polypropylene paper to revisit the image of a cloud. Sun-soaked on top and inky, almost blood-black on its underbelly, the side view of this cloud significantly expands on her work from 2018. Whereas her first clouds were an unending sea of turbulence, the lone cloud in Cuando llegaste is isolated from the rest, laid on its side where it possesses dimension, depth, even a measure of self contradiction.
Standing before this piece, all the pain and fear of Ortiz-Rubio’s daughter’s diagnosis seems to come alive on the canvas. Whereas her 2018 mural for Bread & Salt was focused on the darkness inherent in those emotions, Cuando llegaste introduces layers of complexity, even buoyancy, to the equation—and in that complexity, humanity; and in that buoyancy, hope.
The moment I realized all this, it felt like Ortiz-Rubio had paved a new path forward for those whose art practice is born out of darkness and confusion. For my own writing—which feels either firmly conventional or completely unhinged, but never anything in the middle—Light Cones made space for some of my inner critic’s important contributions, such as a sensitivity to precision and brevity, while filtering out any degree of self suffocation. It gave me permission to reintegrate those disparate parts of myself.
In the face of Ortiz-Rubio’s family’s struggle, it might have been easy to backslide into the simplicity of “black/white” thinking. Especially considering the praise her 2018 work at Bread & Salt garnered, she could have easily settled into the expansive and expressive chaos of that first mural. Instead, Ortiz-Rubio’s embrace of human complexity in Light Cones makes room for the possibility that we can be many things, that the world can feature a brilliant effervescence and a murky, depthless darkness, all at once. Holding both of those truths at the same time is no easy thing—but it very well may be the most important task before us.
Justin Duyao is an art writer, editor, and foodie based in San Diego.