José Ortega - Nocturne

He was a representative of social realism during the Spanish Civil War and a member of the "Estampa Popular" group, of which he was also a founder. At the age of thirteen he moved to Madrid , where he began to create his first paintings and took part in anti-Franco circles, thus linking his later experiences and his work to a strong political and civil commitment. At the age of 26 he was convicted of crimes of opinion, and after his prison term, in 1952 his first cycle of woodcuts was published. In the early 1960s he began his long exile and moved to Paris , where he was awarded the gold medal by the International Congress of Art Critics of Verucchio, directed by Giulio Carlo Argan, for his action in the fight for freedom. In 1964 Antonello Trombadori organized his first solo exhibition in Italy at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome , followed by others in 1968 and 1974. In the following years he held numerous exhibitions in Philadelphia , Toronto , Saint Louis, Zurich , Turin and Brussels . In 1969 he created the twenty engravings of the great suite of Segadores , inspired by the suffering of land workers. In 1971 he worked on the Ortega± Dürer cycle, sixty engravings concerning the theme of the Spanish Civil War presented at the Nuremberg Museum and later exhibited at the Sforza Castle in Milan . He moved to Matera in 1973 , where he had his own workshop in the headquarters of the La Scaletta cultural club in the Sassi , experimenting with new techniques in sculpting bas-reliefs and using papier-mâché in an innovative way together with the papier-mâché masters of Matera; here he created one of his most important pictorial cycles, Death and Birth of the Innocents , presented at the Sforza Castle in Milan and kept and exhibited at Casa Ortega in Matera. He left many of his works as gifts to the city of Matera, to which he was deeply attached. In 1976 , after sixteen years of exile, he was granted permission to return freely to Spain , and was thus able to exhibit his works in Madrid , Valencia and Bilbao , where in particular he displayed the large cycle of bas-reliefs created in Matera; he left Spain again in 1980 to return to Italy, where he continued an intense exhibition activity, settling in the small town of Bosco , in the province of Salerno . He declared that he chose this place because it reminded him of his beloved Spain; he himself said:

"I'm happy with you, because here I've found the anguish and misery of my people. Because the colors are those of my land. I stayed because the laborers' skin is dark and dry, like that of Spanish peasants."

He managed to buy a house (still open to visitors today) where, sitting in the front garden , he devoted himself to painting landscapes and still lifes. His house is a veritable museum , where you can still admire the paintings that adorn it both inside and out. He quickly earned everyone's respect and affection: he is remembered as a solitary and thoughtful man, yet at the same time generous and thoughtful.

I came here to build a little piece of freedom. Working in these lands means constantly observing and learning, to then bring back something truly pure and genuine, worth assimilating. There are moments in people's lives when artists feel that an art with revolutionary content is a necessity. So, no longer art for art's sake. We poets, musicians, painters, we creators of art...against those who preach disengagement and escapism...we feel that the people need artistic forms that call for unity to restore freedom and democracy to the country.

At the entrance to the village, you can admire his famous majolica tiles depicting the 1828 Risorgimento revolutionary uprisings that took place in Bosco. After his death in 1990 in Paris, a group of over 50 Spanish painters, writers, and sculptors paid tribute to him with an exhibition at the Villanueva Gallery in Madrid. Some of his works were also donated to the Savona Art Museum named after Sandro Pertini , his great friend. On September 15, 2010 , the private art high school dedicated to the great painter was inaugurated in Bosco. On March 18, 2011 , the "Casa Ortega" Museum was inaugurated in the same small Cilento village. His remains rest in Paris , in the Montmartre Cemetery . Ortega was an exponent of the pictorial realism that characterizes the work of many Italian painters, such as Guttuso , Migneco , Cantatore , and Guerricchio . He was called the painter of the peasant world for his constant attention to the lower classes, who always inspired his work; the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti , taking inspiration from Ortega's Segadores , to whom he dedicated the poem Ortega de segadores , invented the term ortegano to indicate the oppressive conditions experienced by Spanish peasants. In 2014 , a laboratory museum dedicated to him, Casa Ortega ^[1] , was inaugurated in the house where he lived, in the Sassi of Matera .

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