Ariel Orozco’s first solo exhibition in Italy encompasses various socioeconomic concerns with objects and images that subvert the viewer’s initial impressions. While the artist’s early body of work was defined by public acts tied intimately to recurrent metaphors, the development of his practice has recently switched toward an emphasis on exhibiting the results of process-based works, avoiding documentation of the artist’s presence altogether.
Personal memory confronts reality and social convictions, yielding fragile outcomes, in pieces such as Déjà Vu (all works 2009), an installation that overturns the boundaries between performative actions, sculpture, and photography. A flashy (yet broken) bicycle lies outside the gallery’s entrance—scars and rust marring this otherwise barely used item, as if the bicycle didn’t finish its first ride. In the farthest of the gallery space’s four rooms, an identical bicycle bears the same scars, an attempt to provoke the titular déjà vu experience. The work is didactically completed by photographic documentation of the action that brought about the damage. The recurrence of symbolism in Orozco’s work is fairly explicit in Turista, a photographic sequence depicting a bicycle wheel spinning through a vehicle graveyard, but also makes an appearance in Loop, an installation consisting of a living canary in a room occupied by nearly two tons of birdseed, underlining the disproportion between availability and necessity.
