MADS MIL@NO PHOTO AWARD CATA DEF

David Ortiz Fuertes
“History teaches us that from the beginning, painting, sign, image and creation moved in parallel,
intersecting manual and mechanical skills in an almost secret, hidden way.”
(Luca Massimo Barbero)
Photography and painting are historically distinct and sometimes opposed in common thought, but, already from the
end of the nineteenth century, they have sought dialogue, confrontation and union, that is not always easy. In fact,
already at the birth of the first images of the protophotography, the photographers tried to add color and the artists
immediately grasped the ability of photography to stop the most authentic truth. Starting from the second half of the
twentieth century, this meeting becomes closer, and the riches of oil and the transparencies of watercolor, the scratches
of the pencils and the hieroglyphs of the marker, have been able to blend and unite with photography. Thus, it was
created what is increasingly emerging as a possible “genre” of extraordinary richness and heterogeneity in the search
for an expression that is contemporary and traditional in the same time. For this event, the artist David Ortiz Fuertes
has created his very personal idea of how painting and photographic images can merge to create works of art with a
new and innovative flavor, but at the same time winks at tradition. David used very different photographic shots as a
starting point and inspiration. For the works entitled “Liberacìon” and “Encerrada” David used two very energetic and
communicative shots by the Spanish photographer Miriam Franco. In the first he managed to recreate the movement
of photography also in the model’s body, through a dynamic and material painting. In the second, however, he created
a sharp contrast between the subject of the shot and the painting: to the closure of the subject and the geometry of the
bars, David contrasted a liveliness of colors and a painting, that transmits energy and joy. Instead, in the work entitled
“Fantasìa en Milàn”, David gave new life to a fashion shot, creating a catwalk for the model with painting and an
innovative design for clothes and accessories, in which we find David’s unmistakable pictorial style. The model dressed
in art and color.
Art Curator Silvia Grassi