Trained at the Design Academy of Eindhoven (the Netherlands) Leo ORTA weaves together the visual boundaries of art and design.Through a variety of media including sculpture, installation, painting and performance, his work questions the existential nature of being human and examines the social and emotional bonds humans create within their communities and environments.
« I draw inspiration from different directions such as psychoanalysis, where I learn and search for connection into the subconscious and the imaginary and how to express feelings within works. I love to refer to the metaphors of Henry Moore or the emotional expressions of Niki de Saint Phalle to site big names. And more recently I've been looking at David Altmejd's work for its intuitive relationship to form and its changes of state caused by materials... or Phyllida Barlow who uses readily available materials, often discarding or recycling them for new projects. Secondly, I’ve always been fascinated by the industry, its factories. I seek there the understand of cycles of production, from creating to final uses. How can we twist things up to start implementing new thinking, up cycling, instead of throwing, repurposing instead of destroying etc.. Last but not least, on nature, its organic aesthetics, the beauty of the biodiversity but also how fast and how devastating it disappears... (...) »