The doodles, imprints, blots and stains that fill the pages of Gabriel Orozco’s Diario de Plantas (2021–2) spread out in time as well as space and are, as such, less a matter of formal composition and design than growth and proliferation.
Orozco began to make them in Tokyo, where he has been based with his family since 2017, in small notebooks that he found there; then he carried on making many more of them in Mexico, where he also lives and works. They have travelled with him as he moves between places, and they chart a period of time split mainly between Tokyo and Mexico City, where he has been working on the large public project that will transform and regenerate Chapultepec Park in the centre of the city. Only during the cumulative process of making them did they become something he could imagine as a set of diaries, and only once the notebooks were filled were groups of individual drawings selected from them. This dynamic of accumulation is important to remember when we think of what the Diario is. Close to doodles at times or else elementary leaf prints, the drawings might seem to offer a stark comparison with the scale of the urban Park or even recent garden projects like the one at the South London Gallery (2016). But, of course, these are all trajectories that have developed out of his long-standing interest in nature and the natural environment that were already apparent in his work in the early 1990s. And while the Diario de Plantas may seem modest, there’s something about their deliberately messy provisionality that, while certainly not fitting neatly into pat narratives of art and nature, prompt us to see the work of art driven by its own fragile ecologies and in relation to the precarities of nature.
| Duration | 12 October 2022 - 12 November 2022 |
| Times | Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm |
| Cost | free |
| Venue | White Cube - Mason's Yard |
| Address | 25-26 Mason's Yard (Off Duke Street), London, SW1Y 6BU |
| Contact | 2079305373 / enquiries@whitecube.com / www.whitecube.com |