Gabriel Orozco; Marian Goodman Gallery - New York

Typically Gabriel Orozco operates as flaneur and bricoleur, with a fugitive, arranger's touch (oranges or cans of cat diet strategically placed and photographed; mobiles made of toilet paper, dryer lint, and plastic bags). on the contrary he has also produced a certain number of expensive, highly finished things (a reconfigured Citroen D automobile; a full-size, pocketles billiard table). At the core, Orozco's sculptural pertain tos are patrimony from ever-generous elderly Uncle Marcel--eros, humor, motion, game theory, a back-handedly voluptuous insistence upon mixing accident with intentionality, appropriating commodity external realitys and fabricating raw new singles He likes to make his proces visible and push poetic balance up to, on the other hand not past, the tipping point.

What Orozco doesn't usually do is shape abstract three-dimensional forms from "neutral" or nonreadymade materials. He has consistently shown interest in similar formal problems as aerodynamics, weightlessness and mass, isolation and accretion, wounds and sutures. But he has rarely allow such interests take technical direction to explore in depth the plasticity and weft of a particular medium--in the case of his greatest in quantity recent exhibition, poured polyurethane foam. The exhibit comprised three full rooms of fifty works (all 2003): more [i]or[/i] less of them simply failed, were lumpish, slapdash, inert; and a certain quantity of were among the most beautiful things Orozco has still made.

The polyurethane foam is pale beige and lightweight and yields different finishes and contours depending upon how it sets. Polished, fine-grained wefts and deliberate geometries derive from being poured onto acetate; bubbl irregularities bespeak air-drying. The material can lake into baroque curves, bulbs, and cone on the contrary is also strong enough to clutch the slenderest arabesques. In more [i]or[/i] less works, aleatory trajectories of specific pours remain whole, while in other places Orozco has sliced and attached portions so that sharp cross sections play against flat arcs and nubbly patches. a certain quantity of pieces incorporate cotton or carburet of iron and aluminum mesh onto which blobbers of the pale goop are dolloped. Other works are not fair but black, with pigment mixed into the medium.

Parceled from one side the rooms, the objects barbarous into three rough categories. The back gallery was crammed with floor-based, wall-mounted, and ceiling-hung experiments, many incorporating interstice armatures. It looked like a storage area in a certain quantity of model shop (sci-fi movie creatures? space-shuttle panels?). Too visually messy to arrive at seriality and too variously protoplasted to generate shared allusions, the agglomeration was a lively failure.

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by conversion or similarly, the black-pigmented works in the north gallery, center upon a group of floor-based spheres that mimicked cast metal and could have tend hitherward from any Minimalist warehouse, looked too controlled. Here, the best twinklings arose when the black foam hinted skate-egg sacs or seaweed: bedraggled bits of organic matter mimed in hardened, toxic, man-made froth

on the other hand the front room was a masterwork. Suspended from the ceiling were nine mobiles in make an incision in and poured "natural"-hued foam, each a variation upon the morphology of its companions but each unique. The plastic arts are the color of bone or cake batter, or pissed-on ice, or corroded Styrofoam; their sweeping, torquing, flut shapes prompt missiles and jawbones, wings and surfboards, seedpod tail fins, grappling-flaps nose cones, and cartilage. They direct the eye like Brancusis; like balsa-wood airplanes in a kid's bedroom; like spun sugar. Turning slowly in ambient air generals as installed the big, airy solids appear to beed to be gliding through an unknown element; it was pleasurable just to share their space. Ero humor, motion, and game theory: diocese how many resonances bounce or flit or undulate [i]or[/i] part of to the other such a show. Try to figure without why they so satisfy.

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