Gabriel Orozco: Chicotes

Faurschou Foundation presents in the exhibition space of Beijing the work of Gabriel Orozco: Chicotes, a large installation presenting for the first time in China the work of the artist.

Gabriel Orozco lives in Mexico City, New York and Paris and inspired by his many travels all over the world, his works span a variety of practices: painting, photography, installation and sculpture.
He often works on the basis of the place and space in which he finds himself and has a remarkable feeling for exploiting the history and textures of his materials. With great ease and sharp powers of observation the artist puts together found objects and materials recycled from everyday use, which he manipulates very lightly.

This installation is typical of Gabriel Orozco’s reworking of found, everyday material. It consists of burst tyres that he has picked up along the freeways in Mexico. The Spanish word chicotes can be translated as “whips”, but is also used as a colloquial term in Mexico for these fragments of exploded car tyres that lie everywhere along the roads as a result of the frequent over-use of the tyres.

The force of the explosion has ripped the edges of the pieces of rubber to shreds, and after lying out in the wind and weather they now look like something organic – roots, bark or seaweed. The pieces are neatly arranged – almost in the way we know from museum exhibitions of archaeological finds. Here and there Gabriel Orozco has melted aluminium over the tyre fragments, perhaps as a reference to the whole tyre with its rim, as if the heat from the speed has melted the metal. There is something disturbing about this whole archaeology of urbanity. The idea of speed and “danger” is supported by the strong smell of rubber in the space. The tyre fragments also point to global economic differences and to the potential danger to which we expose ourselves every day as a fundamental condition of life.

Gabriel Orozco‘s overarching theme is his interaction with the world around him and his art consists of displays of this world. His works unite the industrial with the organic, the geometrical with the random, the infinitesimal and the universal, the banal and the significant, the moment and eternity. The world is full of things and life that is lived and in sensual, exploratory and playful ways and often with some part of himself inserted into and affecting his surroundings, Orozco helps us to see things that most of us miss or pay little attention to.