Aranxa Ortega was born and raised in Veracruz, Mexico. In 2010, at the age of nineteen she relocated to Houston, TX to pursue higher education. She received a BFA in Painting from the University of Houston in December of 2015, after which she did art history research for the Latin American Art department of the Museum of Fine Arts and exhibited her work in various galleries. Ortega moved to Paris, France, in the fall of 2016, where she started off babysitting. She later held an administrative job in an international health insurance company. In 2018, chronic health conditions led her to seek treatment, which launched her in a quest for physical and mental health. In 2019, as she quit her insurance job, she was admitted into Tenon hospital’s psychiatric services in Paris for three weeks. Ortega has been painting every day since. At present, she is a resident at 59 Rivoli, a cultural institution in Paris.
Her work reflects the people, places, and experiences of her everyday life, in an attempt to heal the wounds of the soul. Ortega often works from photographs that stand out as triggers for feelings of love, nostalgia, confusion, doubt or even anger, and successfully transcends these emotions to reconstitute a new visual reality, capturing the essence of the moment and highlighting its inherent beauty. The end result is an uncanny collection of paintings and drawings that serve as memorial monuments in her mind, which inevitably tries to filter the past. There is clarification, there is doubt, there is reconciliation and estrangement, but above all, there is the desire to capture the broad palette of human emotions in all of their confused and fleeting expressions.
Ortega is inspired by the forms and color relationships that she observes in nature, as well as by the thoughts and mental images of pain and personal trauma. She finds strength and purpose in the hope to embrace others also going through a journey of introspection and self discovery.
Her ‘combinatory’ approach posits her as a child of our times: her work speaks several languages at the same time, somewhat chaotically but, always producing an end result of remarkable beauty and insight.
