Ben Orozco
Ben Orozco, born in Miami, Florida, is a Colombian-American artist and designer based in Madison, WI. His practice re-encodes spaces, working across paintings, sculptures, and installations. He was recently a 2023-24 Artist In Residence at Starting Block Madison and participated in the 2021-2023 Bridge Work: Madison artist program hosted by Arts + Literature Laboratory, and in 2020, he completed a 9-month Fulbright-Hays fellowship in Småland, Sweden. His work has been published in New Glass Review 41 and 42 (Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY) and has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with concentrations in Neon/Glass, Graphic Design, and Sculpture.
Collect Bean: Tell us about a time when you felt you found your groove as an artist.
Ben Orozco: I found my groove recently when the paintings I made this year came together on their own time. I gathered simple and mundane moments from different processes and places that didn’t always have an endpoint in mind. When I got into the studio, I let the different ideas from my mind, sketchbook, and camera roll combine into sketches and rough prototypes. I let the sketches sit for a while until the winners became clear. The finished pieces managed to capture almost all of the references I was thinking about without having to make more work.
Collect Bean: How does your painting process look like from start to finish?
Ben Orozco: Painting is a way to capture a sense of space by creating a picture plane and adding in objects through re-drawing and re-encoding. I think about the sense of dimension I want to create and build a scene that gets assembled through tracing forms, assembling them in a 3D environment with CAD software, and then flattening the resulting image to 3-4 colors I paint on a 2.5D canvas. The result captures a distinct sensation I have of place without having to replicate it photographically.
Collect Bean: How do you approach the balance between experimentation and consistency in your art?
Ben Orozco: I think of my artistic practice as similar to my design practice. I conceptually and visually build interrelated works like the different characters of a typeface, which balance variety, cohesion, and legibility. I combine the variation of working in different mediums with similar color palettes and visual motifs—the most recent one being shadows—and show them together to create a unique vocabulary.
Collect Bean: Are there any artists or movements that have inspired or influenced your work?
Ben Orozco: Op Art, California Light and Space, and Latin American Abstraction and Modernism movements.
Collect Bean: How does where you grew up influence your work?
Ben Orozco: I spent the first half of my childhood growing up in Miami and the rest of it visiting from the Midwest to see my extended Colombian family. The tropical suburbs that were once my constant background became a special place to recollect my sense of home and look closely at the ways my neighborhood remained maintained or drastically changed through redevelopment and tropical storms. My sensation of home felt oddly flat and lush at the same time, and I use this tension often within my artwork.
