“The Blue Hour” will present a set of paintings by Alberto Ortega that depict luminous scenes of Raleigh at twilight and at night. The scenes evoke mysterious psychological narratives in which human presence is suggested but not revealed. Though executed in a realist style, these paintings are not mere descriptions of places. They expose a retrospective of the overlooked or forgotten stories behind what we’ve seen a thousand times.
“Since moving here in 2008, I have spent the past four years getting to know (or perhaps, “trying to understand”) the Raleigh that lives and breathes underneath the landmarks and other popular representations. After several failed attempts, I began painting scenes of the city at dusk and into the night, realizing that the
ghostly stillness of those images holds a very dense narrative content”. — Alberto Ortega