exhibited: 16.03.-25.05.2024 Antonio Ortega, L’Angélus, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna, AT

Antonio Ortega (b. 1968, lives and works in Barcelona) comes from a theoretical and conceptual background. In 2021, for instance, he published a treatise on the role of Johanna van Gogh in Vincent van Gogh’s life. His paintings of the “L’Angélus” series are therefore highly conceptual in nature. Drawing inspiration from the most famous amateur painter (according to Antonio Ortega), Giorgio Morandi, Ortega decided to paint still lifes in muted colors but substituted vases with stones, which viewers can interpret independently (like clouds, stones are pareidolias, objects in which conscious or unconscious things or supposed faces can be discovered).

The reference to Salvador Dalí’s painting “Réminiscence archéologique de l’”Angélus” de Millet” (1943) was made by Ortega only in the course of his exhibition at our gallery in Vienna (and visualized in one of his works). Dalí’s painting, in turn, engages with Jean-Francois Millet’s painting of the Angelus tolling. The peasant couple praying in the sunset is turned into skyscrapers by Dalí. In Ortega’s work, however, despite the repetition of the material stone, there is a unique anthropomorphization of the objects into subjects.