Orlando Gracia

I admire all art, but modern and contemporary art can quench the thirst of my senses. I like the complexity with which some artists work with materials that you encounter on a daily basis and, through a process that requires time, they manage to entice you, seduce you and inspire you.

Culture is a universe of beliefs, language, traditions, ways of living, even of feeling and behaving. Through culture we identify ourselves and stay on the line of time, without being diluted in a disposable society: humanity creates culture and with it they create themselves. I value the language, the letters, the colors and textures, the smells, the traditions that allow us to be what we are.

In no other time. Being analog-digital is like having the best of both worlds. Although I like history, I see the idea of ​​living in another time as renouncing the unsuspected forms of our time, of being able to be surprised with its magic, its technology, its art. We know little of our time despite living in it. We are meant to spend the time exploring and experiencing what is coming.

Colors are letters in a language of sensations. For me the sky can be blue, but also red, orange, yellow, pink; the light on the objects is what generates the color and in the dark it does not exist. To prefer a single color is to give up endless opportunities to shine differently. My predilection is always grayscale and black, but bright colors always represent energy, strength, dynamism, I like to keep moving.

I like art where no one expects it. It can be in a natural environment, in a landscape. There, where everything is perfect, the presence of a work that makes you think contrasts with the environment in unexpected ways. A piece taken out of context and exposed in an out-of-the-ordinary way represents an opportunity to feel, see, and inspire. Works of art need oxygen to live. That is why I like open places.

The work speaks to you, seduces you and invites you to feel it, generates emotions and makes you recognize even weaknesses, inspires you, questions you and invites you to meet the artist in many cases. I like to appreciate art as the artist conceives it, without limitations or restrictions. Artistic collaborations impact me, it is as if two or more universes come together in one place. In the vestiges of the Second World War, two bullets from different troops melted when they hit each other on the way. The piece created by coincidence generated two molten metals: one bullet inside the other. It is a piece that shows that something dies in war; but in other cases, the conjunction of two artists makes something to be born.

 I love Mexico, its culture inspires me. However, Mexico hurts me at the same time. It is a paradise discovered not valued. There is art, culture, magic, traditions… I had the opportunity to live in India, and culturally they have similarities. Countries like Israel, Turkey or India are places where I am drawn because I perceive a similarity with my country and its culture. I am Mexican and from the border (I come from Tijuana). Here we grow up with that curious and mischievous ambiguity of being part of here and there, of thinking, seeing and feeling differently from the Mexican in general … but obviously I prefer Mexico.

Art is a language. Psychologists may define it as a therapy, lawyers as an escape, doctors as medicine, prisoners as a liberation, architects as a necessity, collectors as a passion. The perspectives are very different, but the common denominator is the way to recreate realities. A method to question, confront, present and show realities and visions of the artist for various purposes, not always aesthetic; the production or recreation of some reality through color, material, texture, the combination of ideas, light, sounds. For me, art is creating what does not exist from what exists, a romantic slip between idea and execution. That perfect dance and that magnetic dance that we live when we begin to see the piece materialize is a spell that surrounds you. Whether we like it or not, the whole world lives under his yoke. Not even ignorance resists art. Through art humanity creates itself.