Gabriel Orozco's work arrives at the Jumex Museum

You can't make a platonic master plan': Gabriel Orozco; his work arrives at the Jumex Museum
After 19 years, the Veracruz artist returns to Mexico with an exhibition that covers his career, such as the intervention in the Chapultepec project, in which he reflects on the impact of public art on social transformation
It is difficult to measure the impact of an intervention such as the Chapultepec project: Nature and Culture. For Gabriel Orozco, transforming the most iconic forest in Mexico City involved a monumental challenge in terms of design and coordination, as well as an experiment that redefined his own vision of public art and social transformation.

Six years were dedicated to imagining and executing a space that, beyond its renovation, would become a living platform, sustained by those who inhabit it, care for it and integrate it into their daily lives.
“I tried to do my best, that is, to reach an aesthetic, ecological, political and social level that could function as a platform with a possible future. If we see it as a public work of art, those who will end up deciding and carrying out that work are the people, it is something that an artist and no one can control, not even a president.

“But in personal terms I did what I had to do. I worked with the teams I had at my disposal, you can't make a platonic master plan, you have to know how to develop points, attack the problem, understand what it is about,” Orozco explained during the press conference at the Jumex Museum, a space that marks his return to Mexico since 2006.
Despite the magnitude of the project, Orozco emphasizes that his approach was not linked to politics, but to the social phenomena that marked this period in Mexico: “I saw it as a relationship with society and the moments of our process as a country. It was not to establish a relationship with a specific government, but rather as a social phenomenon that suddenly gave rise to the opportunity to generate a renewal in an important place that had been abandoned for a long time,” he explains.
A journey of a lifetime

Gabriel Orozco’s work returns to Mexican museums with one of the artist’s most complex and profound exhibitions to date. It is not a chronological journey; rather, it invites an immersion in a space in constant flux that reflects his work philosophy, that is, the constant exploration and the capacity of his art to generate a question, both inside and outside the museum.
“When they invited me to exhibit here, they told me ‘you have the whole museum, do what you want’. I myself am excited to see what is happening here. I will definitely not see this exhibition in the next 20 years, maybe the next time something like this happens, I will no longer be here,” Orozco declares.

Curated by Briony Fer, the exhibition, which brings together 300 pieces, seeks to convey an idea of dynamism, of stratification of ideas and materials, where what he himself describes as a “landscape of strata” has been created, small pieces of drawing and photography that are combined with large-scale works, creating a visual experience.

“In this way, we achieve a journey that the visitor can take in the work with the diversity of materials and gestures that, suddenly, out of context, may seem banal or too light, but when combined, their own process of gestation is demonstrated,” he adds.
Since his first large piece “Recaptured Nature,” which dates back to 1990, the Veracruz-born creator has played with the transmutation of the natural to the industrial, questioning the relationships between the organic and the intervened.

This monumental sculpture, which features a sphere of vulcanized rubber, is just one of the many ways in which the artist has engaged in dialogue with the environment, exploring how humanity can transform nature, but also how this transformation, far from being an act of domination, can become an aesthetic reflection.
“I really enjoyed revisiting them, seeing and reading these pieces again with a fresh look that I hope everyone can understand and question, as one should always do, but, at the moment, continuing to understand that art is simply doing things and trying to do them as well as possible. A good football play or a good building can be a work of art, but not all paintings reach that moment of being works of art.

If we understand that life is one accident after another, we realize that exactly that is stability. The constant is the daily accident. We are a cluster of accident after accident.”
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