Throughout history, artists have responded to social concerns around them with artwork that depicts culture, religion, social injustice, human rights, environmental degradation and political power. Artists have used a variety of media such as paint, photography, pastels, sculpture, and prints as extensions of their caring hearts and concerned minds to explore the aesthetics of interconnectedness and social responsibility. Tony Ortega believes that there is a relationship between art and social justice. His goal as an artist is to create artworks that are personal and which also express a sense of social responsibility.

As an expressionist, Ortega uses distortion and exaggeration for emotional effect. He applies vivid and dynamic mark making, line density, and value contrast, combining flat space with cubical space. His work interweaves the western concepts of perspective, light/shadow, and the overlapping of shapes with folk art designs of simplified geometric shapes, creating a harmonious composition. Merging abstraction, simplification, and realism, Ortega juxtaposes and superimposes unlikely images of realism, icons, symbols, and fantasy from history and the contemporary world to foster opportunities for the bending of meaning and the warping of time and place.

The collective is the primary focus in all of Ortega’s work. Individuals in his artwork are faceless because they are important only to the extent that they help define the group - the community interacting and participating in its many rituals, social settings, and group functions. Ortega’s artwork of common everyday life incorporates elements of magical realism; it confronts reality and attempts to untangle it to understand the mystery of life and human events. Vital is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds, but rather the discovery of the mysterious relationship between human beings and their circumstances. Ortega does not try to replicate the surrounding reality.  Instead, he seizes and illuminates the mystery behind things, attempting to depict not objective reality, but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse. Magical realism mashes up, transgresses, reforms, and transforms ideas into his magical vision without losing sight of social, political, historical, and aesthetic qualities.

Through his work, Ortega offers a multifaceted fiction that incorporates Latino traditions, history, and culture. In the postmodern age, his visual language speaks to the issue of international migration and shifting demographics, drawing from pop culture and seeking to present truth at a more local and personal level.