Iliana Ortega: Magical Abstraction–An Approach to Drawing

Iliana Ortega, Moloka’i, 2022, Iridescent watercolor on archival cotton paper, 18 x 24 inches.

By JONATHAN GOODMAN May 8, 2025

Iliana Ortega is an artist originally from Mexico, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Guanajuato University, a public institution located in central Mexico. Later, she became the first woman from Mexico to be accepted into Yale University’s School of Art, where she completed her MFA in painting. After graduating, Ortega moved to New York City before eventually settling in Springs, East Hampton, NY, on eastern Long Island—a town famously associated with Jackson Pollock (his former home is just a 15-minute walk from Ortega’s residence).

Ortega makes a living by selling her work, though often with challenges, as she searches to find her niche in a country grappling with issues and labels of identity. Her art has at times been marginalized due to these cultural tensions, despite her remarkable drawings and photographs, many of which are inspired by the sea. Water has been a central theme in her work, allowing her to explore concepts of movement, light, rhythm, and natural forces.

Ortega’s art bridges the structural clarity of non-objective abstraction with a deep intellectual engagement, merging these contrasting perspectives. Through her sensory perception of reality and surroundings, her work contextualizes the interaction between human idiosyncrasies and natural forces, making the connection between these worlds feel organic. Shape, line, and color convey both harmony and tension while being informed by intellect and an almost metaphysical intuition. In doing so, Ortega seamlessly blends analytical thought with a deeper, transcendent awareness. She masterfully unites these often opposing modes of perception, creating a body of work where these two worlds coexist effortlessly.

Ortega, at a pivotal stage in her career, has developed a method to integrate primal human instincts, allowing them to take shape within her work. The abstract elements exist independently, yet contribute to the overall unity of the image. Some parts of Ortega’s work may appear aggressive and forceful, but her approach remains consistent—rooted in a deep connection to the raw intensity of the sea.

These drawings, typically created through the simple application of watercolor on contact paper, convey the life of moving currents and still pools without directly referencing water itself. The material has been transformed into a vessel of visual existence, evoking the memory of water by transmuting it into a different medium. Its physical density is represented through a visual approximation of its fluidity. By removing the weight of actual water in her drawings, Ortega reimagines it on paper, dominated by its flat surface. Thus, nature is translated into art.

The works are cohesive, forming part of a series of over one hundred iridescent watercolors Ortega painted between Hawaii and New York from 2020 to 2024. The works vary in size, ranging from large pieces measuring 65 x 52 inches to smaller ones at 8 x 10 inches, with the most prolific size being 24 x 18 inches.

While primarily abstract, the pieces contain forms that suggest sea plants and ocean flora. It’s significant to note that Ortega grew up in landlocked Mexico, and this body of work reflects both her response to new surroundings and her deep connection to water. Ortega has a profound love for the sea, and by choice, she constantly seeks to be near large bodies of water, which she calls her new home. Over the past year, she has lived in Springs, a quiet town on the southern fork of Long Island, where the absence of human presence and the surrounding natural environment have deeply influenced her artistic practice. Ortega has a low tolerance for human stupidity, and she finds refuge in her art, where silence allows her to explore geological and metaphysical concepts that deeply inform her creative practice.

Living in the United States, Ortega values the solitude that nature provides, where the absence of human presence allows her to focus on the natural world’s influence on her work. It is within this isolation that her art takes shape, shaped by both the forces of nature and her sensibility.

The transition from one landscape to another, fueled by both variety and intellectual curiosity, holds profound significance. Art often thrives on the precision with which it captures its surroundings; it is through clarity and meticulous attention that the work finds its depth and resonance. Meadows, trees, flowers—these elements of the natural world offer endless beauty and inspiration. Yet, when an artist like Ortega shifts landscapes, it can signify more than a mere change in scenery; it reflects a transformation in perspective, offering a glimpse into a new vision of the world. In this light, the subject matter itself becomes a window into the artist’s evolving outlook, revealing not only a fresh way of seeing but also a renewed way of being in the world.

This transformation is evident in Ortega's body of work. While the majority of her creations embrace abstraction, her photographs are the only pieces in which representation is employed. In both her abstract works and photographs, the colors possess a luminescent quality—so vivid that the forms seem to glow with an inner light. This illuminated transparency enhances the forms, granting them a lasting visual presence, as if the infinite movement of the sea were not only captured but also transformed into a metaphor of enduring beauty and trust.

For example, one marvelous drawing is called Turtle (2022), although it could also be seen as a relatively abstract rendering of a rock taken from the shore by the sea. Its roughly squared shape, extended by a neck on the upper left and a graphite tail-shape on the lower right, developed by vertical stripes of varying thicknesses, could easily be interpreted as a turtle’s shell. Beginning with the left side, the rectangular slabs are a granite-like blue-white, pink, and white, with a black frame surrounding a brown center, and then the same blue-white we see on the right.

By far, the effect of the drawing is dominated by the subtle and intense variations in color that the form exposes. The shape itself is very simple—no jagged edges or abrupt switches of direction—only the simplicity of a squared form softened, to some small extent, by the curve of a turtle’s shell and its attendant appendages. One might believe that such simplicity would undermine the total image, but that is not the case. Instead, the form, in its directness, enables Ortega’s audience to appreciate her magical application of colors, set within confines suggestive of the sea creature.

A much more directly figurative, and also socially suggestive, image is found in the work titled Carl Andre (2022), referencing the minimal sculptor involved in the notorious controversy surrounding the death of his companion, Ana Mendieta, the well-known performance artist. The figure in Ortega's drawing is discernible: there is a head with a thin caplet of brown hair, while the face has a sky-blue upper interior with a gray lower half. Both lack features.

The head sits atop shoulders and a torso, set at an angle, made solid by varying shades of hue in multivariate shapes. The gestalt of the head and upper body, not in any way realistic, may result in a distortion that could—perhaps intentionally—bias us toward the curious, recalling the tragic controversy some thirty years ago, when Andre was accused of pushing Mendieta out the window from their apartment in Greenwich Village.

Iliana Ortega, Turtle, 2022, Iridescent watercolor on archival cotton paper, 18 x 24 inches.
 

The drawing ties Ortega to very recent contemporary art. Additionally, her choice of subject matter holds significance, especially due to the violence Andre was accused of, particularly in relation to a Spanish-speaking Cuban female artist. It is hard to say if Ortega is identifying with Mendieta or simply abstracting the figure closest to her death. Nonetheless, it’s important to realize that the mention of Mendieta keeps the controversy alive. Even if the work is hardly accurate in its treatment—being a far take from figuration in its abstraction—Andre remains alive in this portrait, as someone who may have been involved in Mendieta’s death.

In another work, Ortega comes quite close to the sea. It is an untitled drawing, but its simple elements link it directly to the waters the artist has come to live so close to. In the upper right of the composition, she has painted a form the color of sand: a roughly round node with scores of thin spikes issuing from it, in some cases reaching far down toward the lower end of the watercolor. Around this shape, which suggests a creature, are vaguely mussel-like shell forms created with black, gray, and white tones.

We must assume that these are the forms of creatures from the sea; there is something akin to museum drawings in their factual specificity. Those of us who don’t know much about the ocean’s flora and fauna may be perplexed by these unnamed forms, but there is no difficulty in appreciating the sharp distinctions Ortega makes in her elements, which represent some of the sea’s extraordinary depth and richness.

To end the piece, we can talk about one of Ortega’s best works of art—Moloka’i (2022). On the left, there is a large red mass, composed of crawls of varying width. Its edges are made intricate by thin, nearly lace-like strands that edge away from the red body to which they are attached. Underneath this gestalt, and more freely visually available to be viewed on the right, are a series of blue/rock-gray stony forms. We know from the title that Ortega is referring to a particular island in the Pacific Ocean, but there is no real sense of a separate body of land being established. Instead, the references have been turned into abstract objects—so that we don’t exactly know what the artist is pointing out.

In any case, the feeling of nature persists in Moloka’i and the other drawings—not to mention the remarkable difference in hue in this work. The red pulls our gaze inexorably toward it, while the rock forms, with their grays and blues, set color variants that contrast with the red being used. Perhaps we can comment that the red is slightly modified—lessened in force—by the grayish, block-like forms. The contrast is surely there, setting up a beautiful array of colors that, at the very least, play off each other successfully.

Ortega, always close to the ocean in this excellent series of watercolors, suggests, but does not closely copy, the fluidity of water as a material to be realistically intimated. Instead, the strong abstraction in what we see suggests the ocean without duplicating its particulars. We infer the beauty of what we see, even if we do not yield our gaze to an exact facsimile.

Iliana Ortega, Carl Andre, 2022, Iridescent watercolor on archival cotton paper, 24 x 18 inches.
 

This body of work by Ortega raises intriguing questions about the relationship between abstraction, the object-free identification of the artist with tonal variations and color of the sea, and the notion of specific, naturally readable materials and objects (no matter whether they are plants or animals) that can be linked to a realist understanding of ocean waters.

We are living in a time when non-objective painting is often preferred over the realist mimicry of form. But Ortega, to her credit, solves the implications of what is best noted as a false dichotomy by merging tones—and, to a lesser extent, shapes—that clearly look oceanic, while also quoting the grand history of American modernist abstraction.

In looking at Ortega’s art, viewers might think of Arthur Dove, the important American abstract painter who used the landscape to create extraordinarily beautiful non-objective art. Ortega’s work occurs more than a few generations later than Dove’s efforts, but similar treatments of visual reality can be noted—especially in the ties and distances between abstraction and a realist vision.

Ortega, driven by her love of water, turns it into something close to mythic, despite the relatively small size of her artworks. Water trades on movement—the play of a fluid substance in oceans, of tides that we cannot see but in fact feel. How does an artist capture movement in the portrayal of the ocean? No matter how much a painter is determined to reduce motion to a stilled existence, it is inevitable that the final result is silent and still.

Art’s materials—paper, paint, graphite—can, of course, be used to represent something in motion. But the final work does not move—unless one is making a film or a mechanical device actually resulting in motion.

In the long run, these sets of contradictions—movement versus stillness, abstraction versus realism, forms that may or may not echo what Ortega is painting—result in art that endures in our thoughts and gaze. The artists likely did not set out to deliberately portray these visionary oppositions and intricacies, but they are available in Ortega’s drawings for all to enjoy. It is a fine series to look at.

In many instances, titles are chosen after the artwork is created. They often serve not just as identifiers but as conceptual accents that deepen the viewer's engagement with the piece. Far from being a mere label, the title can provoke thought and reflection, offering a subtle prompt that encourages viewers to question broader socio-cultural themes and the context of the time in which the work was made. In this way, the title functions as an integral part of the artwork itself, providing an additional layer of meaning that invites the audience to think critically about the social, political, or cultural issues that may have influenced the artist's vision. Through this dialogue between title and work, the artwork becomes not only a visual experience but a vehicle for intellectual and emotional exploration. WM