The project of Casa di Ortega aims to testify the presence in Matera of the great Spanish artist Josè Ortega and to promote the rediscovery of the artisan tradition. The building, once a Lombard fortress located in a dominant and highly suggestive environmental position, houses twenty polychrome bas-reliefs that the Iberian painter created in 1975 in the City of Stones, using the most popular and emblematic local artisanal 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 brutalities of the Francoist dictatorship. Ortega executed these panels in collaboration with the Matera artisan masters, innovatively using the ancient technique of papier-mâché, and it is precisely these pictorial productions that constitute the guiding thread of the project that aims to highlight the importance of the bond between noble art and ancient crafts.

To create the cycles "They Passed" 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 Matera papier-mâché masters, the artist creates terracotta bas-reliefs from which plaster casts are made, in which the papier-mâché mixture is molded. The works thus modeled are fixed on a wooden framework and, finally, painted. Colors are fundamental protagonists of Ortega's art, vibrant colors, rendered with sharp brushstrokes, which give a traditional, humble, 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; red of passion and tragedy, of the flag and blood; black of the forces of death and military uniforms; purple of martyrdom; blue of the fist and revolt. The artist translates into a unique and unmistakable style the teachings of other illustrious predecessors: 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 narrate conflicts, evil, and dictatorship that, in every country and every era, crush man, whose redemption occurs thanks to passion and struggle, in an uninterrupted succession of cycles of death and rebirth.