Orticanoodles. Combinative combinations
The night falls on the city. Outside it's dark and inside there's the oblivion. Ortica is still at home, doing his last tests. He glances down, his shiny eyes are enlightened by the bulb. He picks up something and then looks for something on the bottom. Colours, stencils, prints, pictures, sprays, papers, images, instruments, all put there, as if. As if they had become impassive, just to dissolve and appear again later on. Just as if his best experiments, assembled for years, and placated and restrained with the years, were finally useful to resurrect. After being left to flatten out for a long time, hidden and motionless, under a long carpet, under a bitumen veil. Experiments, kept intact by a bath of perfect darkness, spots, lives, visions and dark layers that sometimes are called street. No other fact can be understood differently. Then, like in real adventures, Ortica abandons his walls, leaving behind the restricted circle of the house horizon. An oasis without mirages that has kept him hidden until now, or maybe just tired, or absentminded but yet outside the outside. And in the meantime the others are all around, parallel knots, secluded oxbows, human wrecks, traffic regulars, remain captured and dipped. The others, crammed in the drowsy and sleepless mercantile navigation of traffic jams, they cross the city to double each starting point. The others, the ones who mull over and then eavesdrop, are closed in haste inside clothes and compartments. In the meantime, like in long sad fairy-tales, under cover of darkness, Ortica, standing in front of a wall, upsets it and re-creates it. Turning it into his new island. Place with no space that multiplies and escapes, because it's made of paper, colours, memories and televisions. Islands in the singular that we'll keep rubbing and seeing, without paying much attention, as we become people or common passers-by. Each day, from fog to scorching heat, from night to waking up, Ortica's vertical islands plough walls, poles, viaducts, embankments, the right roads and stations. And they will be the only ones in their place, maps without geography, spread out between artifice and evasion. Nature sacrificed to the desert distraction of a crowd made of multitudes. Like islands invaded by temporary inhabitants. For Ortica, when you work at the foot of a wall, there's no contrast. No barrier between the outside and the inside, between altitude and depth. In his works, ripped from senseless time- the night in the city - there's no difference between the splendid bright nature and the signs of deceptive solids. Those fake shapes, combined and made shiny by the artist, look like plastic volumes which have just been cranked out, hot above plasters. Porn skulls, fake christs, stupid madonnas, explosive frogs, green flames, winged cages, dissolute reindeers, inflatable myocardiums and variegated carps. There's no search of pure shadow or solitary oblivion inside each of these figures and signs. Both of these atmospheres never appear on his pages - the so called combo- unless he first emits a fluorescent thrill, a jolt of fantasy and anxiety, an inkling of sudden propaganda, unfolded in a conscious and anxious way. Ortica's traditions. In each new idea there are some sorts of exotic elements, a taste for unusual places, although the artist from Milan is the least picturesque of this genre, and the least devoted to re-create a rich shape of tourist colours, a range of colours that we often encounter among acrylics and sprays. Sometimes, whilst looking at the painted walls and the ploughed outlines of this streeter, it seems like he is marking his own subject and trying to blur its meaning. This kind of operation is useful to restore a genetically modified brightness inside the accurately-studied-and-prepared compositional arrangement. In short, Ortica does nothing else but combining combinations, without mixing too much. He alters and puts together similar elements, in order to colonize the indifference of an urban territory. Each part, reproduced by this artist's sharp style, doesn't convey anything abstracted, faded, nostalgic or introspective. Nothing that could take away concreteness from things, from those objects that must be shown as different, by adding and removing the repetition of the happy magic of the present. With Ortica we're constantly out of the pictorial and picturesque choice, engaged in a visual search that aims at pursuing new superficial corners of amazement, the corners of reality. With him the background has the same compulsiveness of everyday reality. And often, his presence elsewhere is so inevitable that in the drawings glued around the city, you feel like moving into a refuge, an oasis with no way out. A labyrinthine clod of clues that contradict themselves and cancel each other out. Ortica's multiple island, like a luxuriant arrangement, is not a place for the soul, nor a titanic or biblical spot in the sea, and neither a climatic station. But it's a smiling and anxious bustling amusement, sweet idle of hesitations, of boarding and landing. It's the product of an absurd adventure that melts together storm and calm, comics and fates, amusement and street, in a phantasmagorical trip.

Text by Ginevra Bria