Painting My Dreams, Daniel Ortega
“Who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? What if somewhere else, on another planet, in another world, the same questions are being asked?" Daniel Ortega sips his mate tea into the long night, inspired…"Why not create my own parallel world, my own characters, and have them tell their story of origin and destiny through my work? That’s the inspiration for Muñecos (Dolls and Harlequins).”
Daniel’s musings started when he was just 15 years old and still lived in Sancti Spiritus, a Province of Cuba. "I still carry it in my bones," he says of his native land, “and it goes with me everywhere. That is why Cuba appears in my art like flashes of light,” even as he now lives 6,000 kilometers away in Argentina. The frequent splashes of the Cuban flag and other motifs of Cuban culture in his paintings – often with accompanying doses of humor – reveal core elements of Daniel’s own origin story.
Muñecos captures a balance between the real and the imaginary; this duality is a key characteristic of these intimate creations. These works have airs of surrealism, Mannerism, and graphic novels. On canvas, cardboard and on the walls of Buenos Aires, the soulful and poetic young painter gives life to his ghosts and dreams, always attempting to create "with a different spin on the matter,” as he says, in Argentinian slang.
As a highly in-demand muralist and street artist, Daniel has completed more than 500 "giant paintings" – some of which measure as much as 300ft in length. He works a lot, but the endless labor must taste of glory, because you can tell that he does it with satisfaction. He paints with one foot on the ground and the other in the clouds, he says.
From a thematic point of view, how would you describe your work?
I paint what I feel, and I do it from my own perspective. I deconceptualize reality, to show things that disgust me and others that fill me with life. Life is full of sensations, and I believe that we should experience the good and the bad.
I like to accompany poetry with a strong image that anyone can consume it in whatever way they want. I want to be seen as a fisherman who has gone out to sea looking to catch a mythical fish ... and once doing so offer it raw, so that everyone ends up cooking it to their individual liking."
Do you believe muralism has enriched your exercise of art?
In front of the canvas, I share a dialogue within a limited space. It is my refuge, where I depart from reality. It is my portal to the parallel world.
Muralism is a creative exercise where there are no limits of space. Even though my creativity is limited in order to represent what the client has asked of me, and despite the fact that sometimes a mural is a group work, I enjoy it with the same intensity.
When I’m afforded the opportunity to unite the two modes of doing; when I am given unlimited amounts of space and no creative limitations, I become like a tiny bug flying throughout the big city, with the entire sky to myself.
Do you believe muralism has enriched your exercise of art?
In front of the canvas, I share a dialogue within a limited space. It is my refuge, where I depart from reality. It is my portal to the parallel world.
Muralism is a creative exercise where there are no limits of space. Even though my creativity is limited in order to represent what the client has asked of me, and despite the fact that sometimes a mural is a group work, I enjoy it with the same intensity.
When I’m afforded the opportunity to unite the two modes of doing; when I am given unlimited amounts of space and no creative limitations, I become like a tiny bug flying throughout the big city, with the entire sky to myself.
“What do you intend to express?”
Sometimes I dream that in another past life we were gods, and those gods still speak to us, but so quietly that we can’t hear them. Additionally, circumstances of life do not usually leave us much time to stop and listen to those ghosts.
I feel we are often manipulated for others’ purposes, thinking and acting as puppets, with something hidden deep inside – our stuffing. Muñecos.
When we leave these rags and go into eternal rest, we return to a life as stuffing within something else that is without memory of a past.