In 1983, at the age of sixteen, Ortega dropped out of school to craft his own art education. He became an active member of the Taller de los Viernes (Friday’s Workshop), a seminal artist-driven workshop founded by Gabriel Orozco, where artists engaged in discussions about art historical texts. Other notable members included Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas, and Dr. Lakra. In this experimental workshop, Ortega's focus shifted from traditional paintings on canvas to sculptures crafted from bricks and tortillas.

A structure made of interlocking tortilla tostadas, Tortillas Construction Module (1998), answers a central question to Ortega’s beginnings: “How do we assume ‘Mexicanness’ from a more honest place, more committed to everyday life and not to a convention of what is no longer?”[1] Mexican culture's artistic expression is often associated with muralists from the post-revolutionary period, such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. How do we pay homage to the past while evading the expectations of what Mexican art ought to look like?

In Moby Dick (2004), Ortega envisions the Beetle as the white whale from the 1851 eponymous novel. In an underground parking garage, Ortega and several other men engage in a fierce power struggle with the car – its wheels covered in grease – while a loud rock band plays in the background. The documented performance parodies Captain Ahab’s obsession with trying to control and destroy the power of the whale in Moby Dick. Before an audience, Ortega mocks the masculine stereotypes associated with the Beetle in Mexico, performing an over-the-top-rock-and-roll tug-of-war and satirizing the bond between man and machine.

Closing out the Beetle Trilogy, Escarabajo (2005) presents a car’s journey to its own funeral. Ortega’s own Volkswagen Beetle is the protagonist in another performance where he drives the car back to the site of the Puebla factory — undertaking a hero’s journey of self-discovery — and ceremonially buries it, marking its birthplace and final resting spot. As the Beetle Trilogy has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world, so has the Volkswagen Beetle. In a way, the Beetle is forever on a hero’s journey, in perpetual transformation.

A frozen explosion of tools splinters from the center of the room in Pico y Elote. Ortega’s Controller of the Universe (2007) consists of a combination of hand and power tools that can be used to take apart a car, construct, cut, or melt a bottle, or even make a book—all processes Ortega has employed in his work.

Controller of the Universe is titled after Diego Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe (1934), the mural first painted in 1933 at New York City’s Rockefeller Center but destroyed shortly after by order of J.D. Rockefeller for its inclusion of Russian Socialist leader Vladimir Lenin’s image. Rivera recreated the mural at Palacio de Bellas Artes the following year. For the first time, these two works are together in the same building–Ortega’s piece just one floor below its namesake. His abstract explosion signals a reinvention, or progression of Rivera’s 1934 expression.

Between 2019 and 2021, Ortega’s primary material was cement bags from the Mexican companies Cruz Azul and Tolteca, which drove the surge of Mexican modernist architecture in the 1920s. Reinforced concrete and the buildings it enabled symbolized a hopeful, utopian vision of a nation emerging from the Mexican Revolution. Utopía Mexicana (2019) references the laborers involved in these constructions—their work often rendered invisible in the face of this vision. Ortega drew inspiration from the uniforms designed in the 1920s by Russian constructivist artists Varvara Stepánova and Aleksandr Ródchenko. Their designs embodied Russian communist ideals: the uniforms were meant to be worn by anyone, identifying whoever wore them as an indistinguishable part of the proletariat, blurring the boundaries of social class. Ortega’s title Utopía Mexicana reflects the tension between hopeful visions of a utopian revolution and the social inequalities arising from capitalist development in Mexico.

Throughout his practice, Ortega has maintained an interest in publication and the power of distribution. Between leaving school and joining the Taller de los viernes, he made political cartoons for newspapers like La Jornada, El Universal, and Motivos. As part of the group of artists who founded Temístocles 44, he collaborated on the fanzine Casper: Revista de título mutable (Casper: a magazine with a changing title), where they resurrected art historical writings, compiling them with their own essays, sketches, and lists of their favorite songs and movies. This approach to publishing laid the groundwork for one of Ortega’s most important and ongoing projects, Alias Editorial, an independent publishing company founded in 2006, dedicated to translating books into Spanish and distributing them in Mexico, Latin America, and Spain.

He views the book as a public sculpture that spreads, occupying both public and private spaces innocuously and organically.[3] Having self-sourced his art education, Ortega shares his discoveries with others, choosing books by artists and writers he admires — Cildo Meireles, John Cage, Eva Hesse, Yoko Ono, among others — all of which were formative for his ongoing learning process. The Antítesis collection, a branch of Alias Editorial, showcases works by artists and thinkers such as Helioflores, Melquiades Herrera, and Minerva Cuevas, who have developed their practices independently from the mainstream. Antítesis presents a contemporary narrative of Mexican art, offering a parallel canon of texts free from convention.