artnexus #38

After an initial stage devoted to painting, Gabriel Orozco (Veracruz, Mexico, 1962) focuses his research on the possibilities found in sources as diverse as video, drawings, photography, and installations, and he's become more interested in emphasizing the documentation of his work's progress than of the work itself. 

His images link us to symbols and signs corresponding to the realities of today's world; from there, the action can take on the streets, their hustle-bustle or the objects inhabiting them, an exploration of everyday events, invisible to the naked eye until the artist calls them to attention. It is not about a purely realistic intention but of the possibility of questioning the act of watching and the registration of what's real. Having found references to inquiry into the most diverse spaces, his works confront the spectator with a permanent variety of situations. 

Be it in terms of gesture or materials, his taste for the economy of resources denotes his refusal to state the obvious or use excessive ornamentation. In his relationship with objects, there's also a tendency to revert to their predictable order. We are unsettled by the loss of their habitual function, and from that perspective, he questions not only the object's functionality but also the categories with which it normally relates.

IVONNE PINI