Gabriel Orozco was born in Mexico in 1962 and grew up in a culturally rich environment thanks to his father, who was a muralist and art teacher. He began his studies at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas before moving to Madrid and enrolling at the Circulo de Bellas Artes.
Gabriel Orozco is an artist who works in multiple forms, creating installations, sculptures, paintings, and photography. His work reveals a desire to reinterpret everyday objects. For example, in Horses Running Endlessly (1995), he exploits the object of the “chessboard” and transforms it. He significantly increases the number of squares and decides to keep only the knights. He plays with our knowledge of reality and presents alienated objects that make us question our conception of reality. This idea is also found in the work DS (1993), in which he modifies the formal appearance of the iconic Citroën DS model by removing a third of its width in the middle.
His work also reveals an interest in geometric shapes, particularly circles, ellipses, spheres, and their subdivisions. This can be seen in Crazy Tourist (1991), a photograph punctuated by alternating vertical and oblique lines created by wooden beams and tables. Small spheres (which are oranges) disrupt the rigidity of the lines. Perhaps his paintings Samurai Tree (2005) and Turbo Bubbles (2005) best express his research into circles.
In the Atomists series, Gabriel Orozco uses news photos and sports photos from newspapers as raw material. In 1996, there were many sporting events, including the Olympic Games and the European Football Championship. His selection includes soccer, cricket, and rugby players, as well as rowers. He chooses photos where they are in motion. Orozco explained in an interview that he has always loved sports photos, but that most of the time, these images are boring.
To make the image more interesting, he added colored circles and ellipses divided into quarters or halves. These shapes are placed in such a way as to follow and emphasize the movement frozen by the photograph.
He succeeds in superimposing two images of different types of movement: the immortalized action of the athlete and his assemblage of shapes. The alternation between full and partially filled shapes contributes to the rhythm of the image. They reinforce the idea of movement in progress, which we can easily follow. Yes, these interventions increase the dynamism of the image. As the shapes are not completely full, he creates another level of interpretation of the image by fragmenting the athlete's body. This fragmented aspect, combined with the color palette (and the title of the series), reminds me of atomic structures. It is as if we were zooming in on matter and observing the composition of the body on the smallest possible scale.
What I like about this series is the stability and balance that emanate from the composition. It reminds me of Vasarely's paintings. I'm also interested in the simplicity of the process. It's as if there were a list of constraints to be respected: a reduced color palette, two identical shapes (color and size) cannot follow each other, the integration of wire elements... I also like how the shapes cut across the photograph and give us new frames of observation, forcing me to inspect the small details.
I think I also like his work because it makes me think, at least. I enjoy collecting postcards and adding embroidered elements to them to reinforce certain details of the image.
