Communication with the purpose of culturally promoting artists included in the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Collection, works protected by intellectual property rights. Their total or partial reproduction or processing by any means, or their transmission or cession in any form is forbidden without the authorisation of the holder of the rights to the works
Millau 005
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Aitor Ortiz (Bilbao, 1971)
Title: Millau 005
Year: 2008
Technique: digital photograph between aluminium and methacrylate gloss
Size: 80 x 175 cm
Edition: 6/7
The reflection of the contemporary landscape and its reinterpretation by the spectator through architectonic stimuli are some features of the work of Aitor Ortiz, whose photographs usually raise questions through structures apparently alien to the context and always real. This is the case with the enormous concrete pillar that marks the compositional pattern of this work, acquired by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation at Madrid’s 2010 International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO). The snapshot used to achieve the image was captured in the area around the motorway that passes close to the French town of Millau, under one of the highest road bridges in the world.
This controversial motorway breaks the purity of the landscape, and it is difficult to disengage from it at any point in the journey. The romantic rotundity of the landscape in black and white is broken by this unprecedented angle that Aitor Ortiz depicts, balancing the perspective with the vertical image of the concrete in the left of the composition. Time and again, the Basque artist’s suggestive creative processes feed on technical rigour and are based on field research on everyday places that are transmuted into different and multiple visions, sometimes serially and always, or almost always, linked to contemporary architecture. The perfect layout of light generates new emotive landscapes, of timeless synthesis, and rearranges the vision of the discovery to raise new unknowns.