Orozco's Tropicality at "Under the Same Sun"

A thing that I sometimes look for when seeing an interesting show are certain works -let's call them "anchors"- around which it becomes possible to better grasp the many connections that the show aims to make. Gabriel Orozco's Piñanona I (2013), featured in "Under the Same Sun," the well-conceived show on view for only a bit longer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was one such "anchor" piece for me (though this show, like all great shows, indeed has multiple "anchors"). The painting brought home many of the dialogues made in the section within the show where it was featured, which was devoted to explorations of tropicality. It also connected presciently with the show's broader exploration of the continental and global resonance of the work of artists active in Latin America during the last few decades. The work's title is the colloquial term used to describe the Monstera Deliciosa, a plant with a wonderful scientific name that is characterized by its large, deep green leaves. Though the plant's seeds can be highly toxic to humans, if ripened long enough these can become edible. Piñanonas grow throughout the vast tropical terrains of the Americas, wherein they take on regionally-specific names (Orozco uses the "Mexican" variant here). Formally, the patterns of tempera and gold leaf echo the intricate geometries of these plants' leaves. The work is structured around the interplay between a series of implied circles -two larger ones which contain each other as well as a constellation of smaller, white ones, produced as the texture of the canvas itself is revealed. These circles are themselves implied by the swirling colorful patterns present that also define the painting, and which seem to converge towards the center of the canvas. In the painting, an implicit "hard" geometry of these pure forms thus coexists in parallel with more free-flowing, organic, perhaps "impure" formal orders, much as it does in the leaves of the "real" plants to which the artwork refers. The painting expands Orozco's long-standing interest in the close, at times surgical, observation of the geometries that define the world as we perceive it. "Under the same sun" places Orozco in conversation, brilliantly, with such formative works as Juan Downey's "The Circle of Fires," (1979), an installation that immerses us in the Chilean-born artist's own encounter with the natural and human landscapes of the Amazon by inviting us to inhabit a circular arrangement of screens where video footage of that encounter is displayed. Orozco's Piñanona also engages works like Federico Herrero's Pan de Azúcar (2014), which distils the iconic geography of Rio de Janeiro's coastline into a series of patterns of color that make this coast's most famous landmark appear unfamiliar and mysterious -indeed, oh-so-tropical- anew. Expressing a fascination with the tropical geographies of the American continent, Orozco's work is at once rooted deeply in the visual culture of the Americas and profoundly global in its aspirations. Its forms emerge from two transnational terrains: the self-referential, universalizing language of abstraction as expressed across multiple artistic media, which Orozco has explored now for quite some time; and that of the tropics themselves, which, in all their organic exuberance, exceed (and often supersede) the 'hard' geopolitical boundaries between the many countries of the Americas where they are placed (elsewhere in the world where tropical terrains exist, similar dynamics play out). Forms drawn from all of these geographies seem to converge and interact on the surface of Orozco's canvas. Far from being resolved, the tensions between them are allowed just enough room to coexist dynamically. As a whole, "Under the Same sun" positions its works and artists in a similar kind of heterogeneous but productive coexistence.