Gabriel Orozco

The two volumes of the Diario de Plantas catalog present 724 drawings made by Gabriel Orozco in Tokyo and Acapulco on 33 notebooks between November 9, 2021, and April 20, 2022. Fifty of them were exhibited in September 2022 at the Galerie Chantal Crousel, in Paris.

“November 9, 2021. Gabriel Orozco is struck by a leaf. He puts that leaf—and six more, for good measure—in his pocket, then sketches them in his diary. April 20, 2022. Orozco has drawn 724 petals, fronds, bracts, needles, every species of flora that has fallen at his feet. Diario de Plantas reproduces, at their original scale, thirty-three of the artist’s plant diaries realized between Tokyo and Acapulco, tracing the evolution of his figuration from the geometric realism of biological diagrams to an efflorescent, organic impressionism rendered with the leaves themselves. Across two volumes printed on bible paper and nestled in a slipcase, Orozco puts the eighteenth-century genre of the botanical travelog to different ends: trading the all-knowing, world-ending encyclopedism of Linneaus and his fellow gentlemen naturalists for an enchantment that approaches what poet Francis Ponge called “l’être végétal” (vegetal being)”. R Morris Levine

Edited by Zolo Press
English
Hardcover
1452 pages
6 1/2 x 8 3/4 in. (16.5 x 22.3 cm)
2000 copies
ISBN: 979-8-9860930-4-8