ART CITIES: Paris-Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco has emerged from the early 1990s as one of the most important artists of his generation. Constantly on the move, without a studio set, he rejects the national or regional identifications, and draws inspiration from the places where he lives and travel, through photography, sculpture, painting and video.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Chantal Crousel Archive
In “Partituras,” Gabriel Orozco invites us into a world where sound turns to color, where rhythm becomes structure, and where the act of painting begins with the act of listening. Created between Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico City, these recent works on paper and canvas are meditations on translation—between senses, between systems, between moments in time.
Each work begins at the piano. Orozco plays not as a musician, but as a draftsman of sound, tracing feelings with his hands across the keys. The brief improvisations—fragile, fleeting—are recorded and later transcribed into musical scores. Notes settle on the five lines of the stave like birds in flight, each pause and interval marking a pulse of thought. From this point, the process unfolds through drawing and then into painting, each stage a shift in language, a rephrasing of emotion.
Orozco has devised a chromatic vocabulary—red, white, blue, and gold—through which each composition is reborn. Yet these are not literal transcriptions. They are reverberations, echoes made visible. Color becomes tone; rhythm becomes geometry. In this translation, the strictness of notation dissolves into a quiet abstraction where structure meets intuition, where control and chance interlace like melody and silence.
In his drawings, Orozco allows the line to wander freely. These works, which he calls fictions, are less bound by rule, more by reverie. Circles drift between the five lines of the stave—miniature constellations suspended in imagined space. The horizontal bands recall textiles or woven threads, suggesting that each piece, like a fabric of sound, is both measured and infinite.
“Partituras” is not merely a visual record of music; it is an inquiry into how sound and image might mirror one another, how one sense might breathe through another. Orozco’s compositions hum softly, alive with the paradox of order and improvisation. They remind us that to paint can be an act of listening, that a line can carry the memory of a note, that color can echo long after sound has faded.
In these works, drawing, music, and painting converge as parallel languages—tactile, temporal, and speculative. Each composition becomes a surface where a sound once occurred, and where, perhaps, it can be imagined again.
Photo: Gabriel Orozco, 17 de Mayo 2025, Paris, 2025, Tempera and gold leaf on canvas , 200 x 200 cm, Photo: Jiayun Deng , © Gabriel Orozco, Curtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel
Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, France, Duration: 20/10-22/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com/
