Fernando Orellana: Recent Work

It’s odd, isn’t it, how war fits so easily into our lives? There is no strain for most of us. Nothing but a fleeting acknowledgment-a distant cousin, three minutes of nightly news, maybe a protest, maybe a vigil. And yet, our daily routine, our way of life, thrives on war. It is infused with war, even dictating how war is to be fought, where it is to be fought, and why. Is it any longer controversial to insist that our modern American wars are fought over oil? No; it’s practically a cliché. The popular narrative is such: Cars and our car-centric society are hurling us down a path of conquest that will end quite poorly, and possibly, quite soon. We have become a people simply, haplessly, dependent on cars.

This dependency on our destruction frames the artwork of Fernando Orellana. He teases out our carefree death wish, building and finding metaphor, and humor, in the weapons and costs of war.

He presents the vehicles simply. A car. A truck. Outlined motionless objects on monochromatic canvas. There is nothing special to these automobiles. Nothing about them, at least, that hints to their latent violence. With names like Go Cars and Yellow Family Van, he presents the vehicles as we encounter them daily, with lines full of life and excitement, and shapes of good, wholesome American value. Taken by themselves, and given cursory thought, these paintings offer a benign, almost affectionate look at the automobile. It is the proximity of these carefree images to the dismembered limbs and IEDs of Orellana’s other works that draws the mind beneath our common relationship with cars, to let us meditate on the real cost of our highways and bedroom communities.

In My First IED, Gasoline, and others, Orellana changes gears, and directs his attention to another popular weapon of the insurgent, the IED. The cell phones that squealing teens and their plodding parents blather into at every shopping mall, high school, and office building across the country have become key components in the homemade bombs that have, many times, crippled the world’s most fearsome military machine. To Orellana, this provides a terribly humorous, acerbic irony. Each of us carries on a slavish relationship with a gadget that is only three or four components shy of warfare. In his inspired Poop Bomb, Orellana gives Nike special mention, a nod of distaste, perhaps, and another layering of critique.

At his most disturbing, Orellana attends to the human toll of war. In Orange Leg, a severed leg, broken and punctured with nails and a knife, is presented coolly. It is impossible to understand the meaning or purpose behind this particular brand of mutilation. How does a leg find itself in such a state? It is even more impossible to imagine the separated man, whose toes have been all sliced off so neatly, and whose muscle is missing large chunks. There is more that is detached in this painting than just a leg, Orellana seems to be saying: There is an entire world detached, where war may be fought but the deaths are meaningless and bizarre.

His series of dismemberments neither shocks nor disturbs; these pieces are too insistent on their own reality to provoke such a simplistic reaction. The effect of these paintings is to get beneath any initial repulsion, and to sit there lingering, an ornery conscience offering garish musings on the costs leveled upon the men and women for whom losing legs and arms means something very real.

In Orellana’s work, we are brought no closer to actual war. That isn’t his aim. Instead, we are brought face-to-face with our own detached understanding of war. We are shown the agents of our own culpability, all laid out before us in a sterile glee. A hysteria of common objects of unnatural color and uncommon meaning: cars and shoe boxes become bombs; cell phones are the detonators. The tragedy of dismembered limbs presented as something no more real than bones that are green and flesh that can be removed in thick, solid slabs. And in this way, he has deeply criticized our way of life, and, therefore, our way of war. The paintings say something uncomfortable about us: We are an infantile, coddled population, ill-equipped to deal with the horrors that we, through our ingenuity, avarice, and ignorance, so casually demand.