Gabriel Orozco
Jalapa, Veracruz (Mexico), 1962

During the early nineties, Gabriel Orozco abandoned the practice of traditional sculpture to focus his attention on urban landscapes and everyday objects. With these, he began a series of proposals through which he sought to transform conventional notions of reality by appealing to spectators’ attention and imagination. The way Orozco approaches objects gives rise to a series of metaphors on the transitory. The appropriation and alteration of objects such as a ping-pong table, an airplane ticket or a chess board force us to re-examine our conventional relationships with these objects and to consider them within the context of social exchange, geographic mobility, economic relations, yet also –and above all- the poetics of the ordinary. Since he made his first impact on the contemporary art world with his DS, a Citröen automobile sliced in half with its centre removed in order to create an exaggeratedly stylised and aerodynamic model, Orozco has created a large number of artworks in diverse media that include sculpture, drawing, photography, installation and video. Nonetheless, in all these cases, the content ignores traditional formal constrictions. For Documenta X, Orozco presented Black Kites, a human skull upon which he had developed a geometric drawing with black rhombus that covered it entirely, therefore literally and symbolically juxtaposing two opposing systems: the natural, physical world and the ideal, abstract world of geometry. As a conceptual artist, Orozco has characteristically detected banal situations and transformed them into metaphorical illustrations of the poetry of the ordinary: human breath just about to disappear from a shiny black piano -Breath on Piano-, a dog sleeping on sand, the movement of his tail making a drawing -Dog Circle- or a ball in a puddle reflecting the night sky, wherein the ball doubles as an enormous full moon -Ball on water-. All these works are presented as photographs as well as documents that capture, not only the passing moment, but also the subjective presence of the attentive artist who knows how to recognise these ephemeral sculptural events and record them with the camera so they will last. Gabriel Orozco has presented his work in prestigious centres and museums all around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Venice Biennial and Documenta X and XI. Recently, an extensive retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Mexico City and at the Contemporary Art Museum of Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Mexico, Paris and New York. I. M. B.

Descending Path, 2002
Ladrillos Frotados, 2002

Descending Path and Ladrillos frotados (Rubbed Bricks) both belong to a set of works in which the artist presents himself as the catalyser of situations that may be considered sculptural and which, almost imperceptibly, burst into everyday life. These interruptions of reality basically take place in two realms: the world of objects and the natural world. The first of these pieces was carried out in a supermarket, where Orozco collected objects in order to create slightly inconvenient or blatantly ingenious situations such as in Gatos y sandías (Cats and Watermelons), where Orozco gingerly placed cat food cans on top of a pile of watermelons, or Buho (Owl), where, by putting a can of pineapple slices in syrup on top of a package of fresh herbs in a triangular shape, the image of this bird was automatically created. Cinco problemas had clearer connotations: five potatoes were transported from the vegetable section to the stationary section to be placed on five stacks of notebooks. The intention of these gestures is evident, they do not come about by chance or coincidence and that constructive aspect has been fundamental for Orozco in the development of this type of work. If the contrast between objects was what attracted attention in these pieces, his interventions in the natural environment or urban landscapes would have more subtle qualities that were more camouflaged within the very logic of the space by consisting of materials, found in the places themselves, that were altered. This is the case of Ladrillos frotados, an entirely sculptural and ephemeral piece that has been captured photographically. As the title suggests, it consists of a set of bricks that have been rubbed against rocks upon which they were placed afterwards. A slight trace of red dust remains and the bricks have been placed in an orderly fashion forming a precarious monument. The chromatic integration of the bricks into the rest of the landscape contrasts with the very geometric forms of the bricks and with the inexplicable care with which they were placed there. This subtle type of intervention on the landscape has its antecedents in pieces such as Turista Maluco in which, at the end of the day, Orozco placed rotten leftover oranges on the deserted tables of a Brazilian market or A la puerta del volcán (At the gates of the volcano) in which he stuck a snowball, inevitably destined to melt, on some wooden stakes. In each case the artist’s presence, the subjectivity of his glance, is the element agglutinating the proposals. Even in a more subtle piece such as Descending Path in which it is not completely clear whether the sculptural situation we see in the photograph is a product of a chance encounter or a direct intervention on the part of the artist. Regardless, they are situations within the subject’s reach and very different from the grandiloquent intrusions of land art. On the contrary, they address an individual who has left a brief trace of his passage, an almost invisible trace that nevertheless leaves us with the disturbing sensation of having witnessed a reality that is not entirely real. I. M. B.