'Human Papillomavirus: Virus Meets the Skin'
Joselo Ortiz
January 2021
curated by
Joey SIm, Natalie Tso, and Alia Timmins
In Ortiz's words: the body talks about what happens in society; it is the objective evidence of something subjective. For the history of art, the body has usually been represented from naturalistic, symbolic, and stylistic perspectives, etc; but hardly as an organism that "registers" its environment, and that memorizes its biography through its general health conditions, its physique and its metabolism. For Joselo Ortiz, the body is a very efficient receptacle of social, political and cultural stimuli, which as a kind of frame narrates everything that has happened; shows its footprints.
His intuition as a sensitive member of society - rather than as a doctor or artist - sifts everything that is linked to the lifestyles of patients to make a kind of anthropological study that helps him determine the conditions in which people live, greatly anticipating the way they will continue to live.
In this series of interdisciplinary works the border between art and medicine at times seems to be completely dissolved; and it is that both medicine and art seek to decipher the human phenomenon. Both fight the battle between life and death. - Gonzalo Ortega