The Casa Ortega project intends to bear witness to the presence in Matera of the great Spanish artist Josè Ortega and encourage the rediscovery of the artisan tradition. The building, once a Lombard fortress located in a dominant position of great environmental beauty, houses twenty polychrome bas-reliefs that the Iberian painter created in 1975 in the City of Stones, using the most popular and emblematic local artisan technique: papier-mâché . The twenty bas-reliefs make up two narrative series: “ They Passed ”, which retraces the Spanish civil war, and “ Death and Birth of the Innocents ”, a denunciation of the brutality of Franco's dictatorship. Ortega executed these panels in collaboration with the master craftsmen of Matera using the ancient papier-mâché technique in an innovative way and it is precisely these pictorial productions that constitute the underlying theme of the project which aims to highlight the importance of the link between noble art and ancient crafts .

To create the cycles "Passarono" and "Death and Birth of the Innocents" Ortega experiments with the possibility of giving "three-dimensionality" to his painting through the use of papier-mâché. Together with the master papier mâché makers of Matera, the artist creates terracotta bas-reliefs from which he creates plaster casts in which the paper mixture is moulded. The works thus modeled are fixed on a wooden scaffolding and, finally, painted. Colors are fundamental protagonists of Ortega's art, bright colours, rendered with clear brushstrokes, which give a traditional, poor and recyclable material an aura of sacredness. The chromatic choices take on a fundamental semantic value: white and yellow, colors of life and spring flowering; the red of passion and tragedy, of the flag and blood; the black of the forces of death and military uniforms; the purple of martyrdom; the blue of the fist and the revolt. The artist translates the teachings of other illustrious predecessors into a unique and unmistakable style: the dark atmospheres of El Greco, some themes of Goya, the anatomical deformations of Picasso, the masses of color and lines of Mirò. The bas-reliefs tell of the conflicts, evil and dictatorship that, in every country and in every era, crush man, whose redemption occurs thanks to passion and struggle, in an uninterrupted succession of cycles of death and birth.