Pia Ortuno approaches her practice as Rodin approached a cathedral - seeking to understand it both as painting, rendered in light and shadow, and as sculpture, balanced and proportioned like the human body. Like a cathedral, her work encapsulates time, holding traces, memories, and echoes within its form.
Deeply rooted in the Costa Rican landscape and its customs, Ortuno draws from a spectrum of cultural influences - from pre-Columbian spiritual rituals to post-colonial religious iconography. Her experience of separation from her homeland, alongside the unfolding of a new life elsewhere, creates a dual sense of belonging that informs a layered and evolving personal narrative.
Through a multidisciplinary ensemble of painting, sculpture, and installation, Ortuno explores the tension between industrial materials and decomposing metals, and their interplay with natural pigments, traditional mark-making, and ritualistic gestures. She records time through the physicality of chisel marks - neither too shallow nor too deep - disrupting the surface to create planes where light and colour perform a quiet, deliberate dance.