Pia Ortuño: The Day of His Wrath

This April, Pia Ortuño will present ‘The Day of His Wrath’, a major new body of work in which the artist returns to her early training as a marble carver in Carrara. For her first solo exhibition in Portugal,  Ortuño will take over the entirety of Duarte Sequeira Gallery in Braga, creating an environment described by the artist as a 'mountain turned inside out'.  Centered on a monumental hand-built architectural altar, the show draws on aspects of spirituality and worship, embodying the divine within the collapsed landscape. Both in scale and subject, the project represents an ambitious expansion of themes that have endured since the beginning of Ortuño’s career, the personal and cultural narratives interwoven with the artist's exploration of new forms of making.

By carving and marking with a chisel, Ortuño introduces light and shadow to the surfaces. The raw pigment, oil paint, rusted metals, and marble dust establish a palette that references Ortuño’s Costa Rican heritage; vibrant, immersive and rooted in the colours of nature. The feeling of a tortured and scorched earth comes through in her work, conveying a sense of loss and transformation.

The exhibition takes its title from John Martin’s apocalyptic work ‘The Great Day of His Wrath', which depicts the Earth being split open by God. This scene recalls the dynamited passageways and scarred rock faces that Ortuño saw in the deep quarries of Carrara. She describes the void left behind as “time stolen from the earth”. Inside Duarte Sequeira’s underground gallery space, the new paintings are constructed from blocks, referencing the laborious process of mining, hewing, and shipping the marble. The blocks migrated between paintings as Ortuño worked on them, allowing one painting to finish another in an endless loop of possible arrangements.