“The functional pieces have elements of how I grew up connecting with my family around the dinner table and food,” Marcello Andrés Ortega says of his ceramics. “And there's another aspect of this work that's about process and materials. Those pieces are more sculptural.” The child of Chilean immigrants first dabbled in clay when he was a student at St. Mark's Basilica. was. Currently, he creates tableware for the city's top tables and sculptures inspired by the waves he surfs in Mexico. During that time, he achieved success in his corporate finance career.
The Quonset hut that houses Marcello Andres Ortega's pottery studio in Cedars was once used to construct floor displays at Neiman Marcus. One of his store's white-lettered signs still hangs inside the rusting building.The whole place has a bit of atmosphere mad max Conservatory atmosphere with wild vines growing on galvanized steel walls through glass awning windows.
Just inside the door, Ortega is showing off his shiny new kiln, which hasn't been installed or named yet, but he's leaning toward the big girl. (His others are her R2-D2 and her Big Boy.) He hasn't fired her yet, but she will soon. We have already had to cancel orders because our kiln has reached capacity.
Ortega, as lithe as the soccer player he was as a kid but now sporting a Selleck-worthy stash, drives a vintage pickup truck and the building's owner, Mark Martinek (developer). Weaving our way through roof-height planks of untreated wood. The nearby historic Blue House is being restored and turned into tables. The enclosed space at the back of Ortega is compact but bright and sunny. In his old studio in Mesquite, he had to work right next to a kiln that was unbearably hot. Here he has more room to maneuver.
Ortega took ceramics for two years as a student at San Marco University, but never thought he would pursue it as a career. His father, a Chilean immigrant with an engineering degree, was involved in designing his airport conveyor belts in AutoCAD. His mother started cleaning houses, then worked in a restaurant, then took a job at a clothing company, eventually retiring as a buyer. So when Ortega enrolled in his SMU, he prioritized financial security and studied economics and finance.
“Food is art, so my style is minimalist.”
During my last semester there, I took a pottery course to fulfill my requirements. Our year-end project was a special wood burning in a kiln near Cedar Creek Lake. “This is the oldest way to set off fireworks,” Ortega says. “Originally, people fired ceramics this way. When you literally burn wood, the wood ash, especially the bark, scatters onto the product and decorates it.” He was hooked. But first he earned his degree and spent a few years working in corporate finance before jumping into curator Leslie Marshall's artist-in-residence program.
He honed his skills as a studio technician in the acclaimed ceramics program at the University of Dallas' Brookhaven campus, where he worked with respected Texas ceramicist Professor Adam Knoche and internationally renowned porcelain artist Du・I deepened my friendship with Professor Chau and others. (Like Ortega, pathologist Chau is a combination of his left-brain and right-brain personality.)
One of Ortega's first commissions was for the ruins of Deep Ellum, where he designed a copita, a small mezcal cup with raw clay on the outside and a bright citrus glaze on the inside. His friend Greg Katz then decided to order his 900 pieces of custom tableware for his new restaurant. “I paid attention to every detail of Beverly's,” Katz says. “And tableware was really important to me. I wanted to make ceramic plates and I was like, 'Well, crap.' It would be even better if we could hire a local Marcello.''
Ortega moved his studio to a Quonset hut the following year, in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests. “Simply put, during the week we go to police checkpoints in a moving van,” he says. “I mean, things were tense. They're all clutching weapons. They're like, 'I've got art-related equipment, please let me through.' ”
Last year, he introduced his own black tableware series called Texas Night, which turned out to be an unexpected homage to Tex, the Jack Russell he had with him for 17 years, who soon passed away. This spring, he launched a consumer website featuring tableware and copitas, as well as unique wood-fired vases and sculptures inspired by waves surfing in Mexico.
He continues to work with chefs and restaurateurs, creating coffee mugs for Meridian, copitas for La Mina in The Village, and plates for The French Room and Misty Norris' reboot of Petra and the Beast. I am. His candle containers will be available at Adolphus' gift shop, Commerce Goods + Supply, in October. In addition to designing barware for La Viuda His Negra, he also ventures into decorative sculptural wall work for owner Javier Villalba and light fixtures for Austin's bar.
Molino Orroyo's chef Olivia Lopez is testing experimental plates for dinner tastings. “Of course, I chose the weirdest, oddest shaped one, different from any plate you can imagine,” she says. “One almost looked like a piece of wood. One looked like it had a broken edge.” She uses his copita to serve ice cream, salsa and palate cleansers.
Ortega is working with her landlord, Martinek, to complete the vacant space next to the studio and create a pop-up retail store that doubles as an espresso bar, scheduled to open this month. During that time, he invited me to join him in a collaboration he was working on with Gabe Sanchez at Midnight Rambler on the bar's artist-in-residence cocktail series. For the Filthy 2.0 Martini, Ortega's Copita contains olives and lactic-fermented onions. For the Double Down Daiquiri, he created a container that suggests the cracked half shell of a coconut. He is assuming that he will hold it with both hands. The inner lip has a glossy, rough texture that stays surprisingly cool to the touch.
“My philosophy regarding the aesthetics of my work is that food is art, so my style is minimalist,” Ortega told me in his studio. But as I sit in the back of a basement bar on a hot summer's night, cradling a cold daiquiri, it's clear that this vessel is transformative, changing both the cocktail experience and the act of drinking it itself.
But when it comes to Pony Beer's sidecar, it certainly feels like art.
This story originally appeared in the September issue D Magazine with the headline.Time until entering the kiln” Write to [email protected].
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Kathy Wise is the editorial director of D Magazine. She is a qualified lawyer and is known for the…
