Untitled (Jardineras)

Ortega dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to begin a career as a political cartoonist in the tradition of José Guadalupe Posada before turning to sculpture and photography. Jardineras belongs to an ongoing project devoted to the sidewalks of his native Mexico City, studies of man-made decay and natural renewal-from sinuous arabesques of grass sprouting from cracks in pavement to the barren, crumbling tree planters shown here. With its grid structure and entropic content, Jardineras wittily references the 1960s Minimalist work of Sol Lewitt and Robert Smithson. It also relates to a project of 2001 in which Ortega organized a campaign to raise awareness of the global problem of CO2 emissions by encouraging museum visitors to sponsor the planting of trees in the center of a busy traffic hub to absorb the poisonous gas. In both works, the artist converts the flaneur's refined yet passive appreciation of urban disarray into a socially engaged art without sacrificing his trademark poetry and wit.