Notes on Gabriel Orozco’s Partituras
Do: abstraction
Long since sidelined in the early 20th century history of abstraction, the idea of music- as-model now feels like a distant reminder of a time when it was possible to believe that art could strive for its own transcendent essence. One of modernism’s loose ends, let’s say, or one of those self-serving myths of purity that demonstrates abstract art’s irredeemably idealist foundations. So there’s something deliberately out of sync – even improbable – about the way Gabriel Orozco’s new paintings recall abstraction’s original alliance with music - one clearly articulated by painters like Kandinsky and Kupka who were both interested in the sound of colour and the possibilities of chromatic vibration in painting. At that historical juncture, when art was seeking its raison d’etre in its own autonomous language of form, music served as a model of a pure artform which did not rely on representation or resemblance to objects in the world in order to explain itself. If Orozco’s unlikely course in this new body of work explores a relationship to music, it is, of course, not in search of the spiritual in art. Instead, he turns this mythic origin on its head to break the musical score down into its most basic material units; instead of striving for the vibration of the soul, he explores the vibrations within a particular situation.
Re: score
In the new Partituras, Orozco treats the musical score as an interface between the act of playing the piano and the act of making a painting. Although he doesn’t know how to 1read or write music, he has always improvised on the piano. For this series of paintings he begins by sketching sounds on the piano keyboard. They are not inspired by the music of a particular composer like, say, Brancusi making a sculpture in response to a piece by Erik Satie. In this case, the relationship between painting and music is absolutely not the ‘theme’ of the work but simply provides a procedure – and a space to work in and through a set of rules that he sets himself. The diTerent stages in the process are clear and worth noting, not because they explain the work, but because they show how far the scores have travelled from the original act of playing the piano. The paintings begin with Orozco improvising at the keyboard. This is a part of the process he associates with particular feelings as he ‘draws’ with his hands on the keys. When he played the piano for this project, he recorded his improvisations, usually lasting only a few minutes; the recordings were then sent to a professional musician to be transcribed and printed as a piano score. Each short piece that he makes was rendered in this way, with the notes distributed across the five horizontal lines of the stave -pentagram- according to the traditions of musical notation. Next, the score was translated into a diagrammatic drawing and only then into a painting. Based on the system Orozco has created using the four colours, red, white, blue, gold, each painting corresponds to a particular piece of music, but has been highly mediated and transformed along the way.
Mi: translation
The process is a series of translations, then, that take place over an extended period of time. As a procedure, it’s a variation on the way he made the Samurai Tree paintings 2based on the rotation of the knight’s move in chess. But now there are several stages involved: from playing, to recording, to listening, to transcribing, to drawing, to transferring, to painting. These allow for multiple spatial and temporal transpositions. It’s important that the titles consist only of the date and the time he played the piece on the piano, although evidently the painting we are seeing has undergone several phases to become the precision diagram that it is. The process is circuitous – but as Orozco has said, it’s possible a musician could actually ‘read’ the Partituras paintings and make musical sense of them. There are certainly aspects of encoding and recoding that happen as he turns the score into his own system of geometry. In the process, one could say that the artist creates his own semiotic system, translating each individual note to a corresponding sign.
Fa: drawing
Drawing, like time, is everywhere in this body of work, from the readymade graphic template of the pentagram to the drawings on paper that he has been making throughout, alongside the paintings. Even before he settled on the procedure for the Partituras, drawing was a way of thinking it through, just as it has always acted as a kind of substrate to his working method. Here it punctuates the project at key points: remember he thinks of his piano playing ‘as a kind of drawing with sound and rhythm’ – so it becomes a kind of origin point in the whole process, as well as a mode of translating one medium to another; and think of all graphic transcription involved, turning a recording into sheet music into diagram and so on. 3On the other hand, Orozco regards the actual drawings on paper that he makes independently of the process as ‘fictions’ because they do not have a one-to-one relation to the sound or melody of his piano pieces. They are more improvisatory, detached from the stricter rules of codification of the paintings. At times, the repetition of the lines suggests a kind of waywardness, as the more open and rhythmic movements of the pen move over the pentagram sheet. Some are reminiscent of his early blind drawings, others feel more like an enigmatic or cryptic form of writing. They are often the indicators of a new direction, with some proliferating nodal points as thelines join, others creating graphic turbulence. In turn, some of the freer movements in the drawings have re-entered the paintings, creating an even stronger sense of vibration than before.
Sol: semiotics
If the Partituras project reflects on the origins of abstraction, it also reminds us of other ways in which a relation to music has been cast in critical and transgressive terms diametrically opposed to the spiritual yearnings of the early abstract painters. Think, for example, of Roland Barthes’ seminal study of semiotics, Image-Music-Text, which included an important essay that has tended to be forgotten called ‘Musica Practica, ’ a discussion of the ‘two musics, ’ the kind you play and the kind you listen to. There’s acertain symmetry in the way Barthes describes sitting and playing the piano as the most ‘muscular, manual’ part of music and the way Orozco likens playing to drawing, which is arguably also the most ‘manual’ part of art (this is certainly the case in his own practice). If one thinks of the fact that a major semiotic rupture occurred on the site of 4Cubist collage – I can’t help but think of all the musical scores those papier colles contained – then this is the more far-reaching historical conceptualisation that Orozco’s new paintings point to. I’m not suggesting an overly literal or direct analogy to our own historical moment of technological, political, social and psychic rupture, but perhaps we could see the paintings as some kind of unlikely touchpaper for thinking along these lines. Maybe even more to the point in this context would be Adorno’s essays on music, the first of which were written in the years of the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930s, which speculated on the situation of music as part of commodity culture. Rather than a retreat from reality in totalitarian times, the questions Adorno asked about the critical value of art in culture were urgent ones then, as they surely are again now. The idea that new realities require new techniques and that advanced art cannot aTord to abandon its own relative autonomy was at the centre of debate about art’s role in culture.
La: vibrations
It feels like Orozco is deliberately doing an experiment, as if, as he has said, he is trying to make a periodic table of elements that would chart the entire lexicon of musical signs. The almost miniaturised configurations of the circles that substitute for notes feel almost like a mise en abyme, where familiar elements within his geometric language are dispersed across and ‘float’ in the spaces between the lines. This creates an entirely diTerent orientation in his work, driven by the horizontal lines of the pentagram – or what Orozco neatly calls the ‘linear horizon’. The bands of colour invoke textiles and thread, rather than revolving circuits. Paradoxically, despite what might be seen as a surfeit of intricacy filling the pictorial surface, they interrogate very basic semiotic 5questions about how to make paintings at a time when that seems a very improbable question to be asking. Rather than reference more familiar avant-gardist models of notation, from John Cage to Iannis Xenakis, the Partituras paintings veer in a diTerent direction, recalling other strands within a history of abstract painting. They are maybe closer to the reverberating qualities of the Op artists of the 60s – like Victor Vasarely or Bridget Riley – in their exploration of vibration within optical perception. There are echoes too of Agnes Martin’s horizontal bands and Cy Twombly’s graphism. But it’s the basic structure of the pentagram that activates the visual field, and the layers and elements laid over it that give the paintings their material and temporal density. A certain amount of the initial graphite drawing is always left visible, implying each painting itself has a history and has come into being over time, leaving its memory- traces. And the fact that they are made using egg tempera and gold leaf – very old techniques that Orozco has used frequently – suggests a kind of archeology of early sheet music, especially medieval musical scores with schematic black notes on red pentagrams with marginalia in gold. In any given environment, the horizontal bands of gold leaf pick up the light like dust, and the tiny gold quadrants in the notes spread out like a constellation or shower of distant stars. As paintings, then, they are unpredictable and entirely susceptible to their surroundings and the passing of time.
Si: time
In the end it’s hard to conceive of a set of paintings more strictly structurally determined, or resistant to ornamental embellishments for their own sake. If they oTer 6a kind of false lure, they also refuse it by laying out a set of experimental conditions for the possibility of painting. After all the mediations involved in the process of making them, perhaps the paintings can be seen as ‘time-pieces’ of an unconventional kind, where the medium of time itself is at stake. The paintings are obviously not instruments to measure ‘clock-time’ but they do plot out diTerent kinds of rhythm to create pictorial fields that reverberate, resonate and vibrate. As in all translations, there is always a process of transformation involved – and here, for sure, rather than a direct equivalence between music and painting, Orozco has created a highly mobile and intricate set of correspondences. If time can never be depicted directly in painting, it enters here almost by stealth, caught in the spaces and intervals of the pentagram.
Paris, 29 August 2025
The exhibit opened on 12 September and will close on 25 October 2025 at the Gallery’s New York Location at 385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013. There was an opening Reception: 12 September 2025, 6-8 pm
For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s site. The gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.