Art & Exhibitions
Gabriel Orozco Channels an Altarpiece
THE DAILY PIC: The Mexican recombines the ingredients of Italian Renaissance art.
Blake Gopnik
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Gabriel Orozco’s Inner Sections Gamma is on display in his solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. The witty boomerangs-as-art, in the front room, grabbed my attention at first, but the longer I looked at the abstractions in back, the more I recognized their roots in the non-abstract. Each work consists of a gessoed white ground, covered in gold leaf and then painted with details in ultramarine blue and brilliant red tempera. (Click on my image to see it enlarged.) That means that they have all the ingredients of a classic quattrocento altarpiece, recombined and exploded on Orozco’s surfaces. In today’s Daily Pic, I’m particularly fond of how the geometric system in the center, worthy of the kind of order prized by Renaissance neoplatonists and perspectival painters, breaks up under the power of centrifugal–dare I say mannerist–forces. (Courtesy Gabriel Orozco and Marian Goodman Gallery)
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