Headline Oct26,2012/

''THE MASTER OF LEFTOVERS''

From Cars to ping-pong tables, Gabriel Orozco uses reclaimed objects, quirky juxtapositions and child's play to create some of the world's most intriguing art.

For all of the 20th century in the cities of South and Central America, there have been artists and writers working with a small coterie of friends who have produced work of real originality and slf-conscious importance. In literature, for example, the work of Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortazar in Argentina, or the work of Clarice Lispector in Brazil, has displayed a mixture of intellectual rigour and pure playfulness. Slowly, this work has moved from the periphery to the centre; it was read by the writers  before it was read by readers, and was later adapted and devoured in Europe and North America.

Gabriel Orozco, who was born in Mexico in 1962, and whose retrospective ran at MoMA in New York until 2010 comes from a Mexican tradition which is educated, urban, sophisticated, deeply original and highly self-conscious.
The fact that the world views Mexico as exotic, slightly unreliable, colorful, maybe even primitive, has nothing to o with Orozco. His willingness to make work which questions the very idea of tradition and the image, also manages to be visually fresh, startling and arresting sets him apart not only of the idea we have of Mexican art from his North American and European contemporaries who drearily hammer away at the questions, achieving deep dullness along the way, a dullness apparent now in every single gallery of contemporary art you wander into.

For Orozco, both nature and culture are terms that evaporate; instead there are shapes and objects.Sometimes at the core of a piece by him is something organic, other times, it comes from memory, experience or art history. His work is both playful and exploratory like that of a child, and also filled with serious references and concepts like that of a highly educated adult. What makes it strange is that he has left out the middle part.
''American culture,'' he once said, ''is based on the teenager. It is decadent and self-indulgent. So much self-exploration with no connection to reality.''

This Post is dedicated to the talented students and artists of South America. With many thanks to !WOW!

Good Night & God Bless!