The Brooklyn Rail

In Gabriel Orozco’s exhibition, Partituras [scores], traditional music notation is endowed with restless dynamism. Orozco’s meticulously crafted images are based on transcriptions of his piano improvisations. Orozco worked indirectly, asking musician-friends to create scores from recordings of his improvisations. These became the sources for the eleven large paintings and twenty works on paper in his exhibition at Marian Goodman. Orozco translates scores into hermetic notations, drawn from the template of his “Samurai Tree” paintings: using the rotation of the “knight’s move” in chess to generate organic growth, the notation—a quadrant of squares and circles—combines the geometry of Russian Constructivism with the colors of icon painting, recalling both medieval manuscripts and modern circuit boards.

The “Samurai Tree” motif can be traced back to a light box Orozco created in Korea in 1993, in response to lighted signs in Korean which he didn’t understand; here, the complex signs of musical notation, which he also doesn’t understand (he doesn’t read music), provide a springboard for his personal combination of precision and inscrutability. On fields of gridded circles, which he has used in other paintings to generate unfocused, “floating” images—most recently a hybrid of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490) with the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. Circles subdivided into quadrants of red, blue, white, and gold leaf serve as the “neumes” of medieval plainsong. Proliferating like yeast cells in progressively smaller iterations along the axes of delicate pencil lines, seemingly enmeshed in the weave of the canvas and with their attached smaller circles suggesting the wings of gnats or satellites, they hover around colored horizontal bars that replace the five-line staff of sheet music. Orozco’s paintings eliminate many fine points of music notation, but by introducing color (conceptually standardized, not expressive or synesthetic) and varying the length and layering of his colored bars to suggest sustained notes and harmonic layering, he’s apparently provided a sufficient code for pianists to “perform” the paintings.

Even if musicians can perform them, to treat the paintings as musical scores reduces them to utilitarian objects and overlooks their built-in aesthetic dynamics. Orozco refers to the lines of the staff as a “linear horizon,” and they suggest landscape, or the abstractions of Agnes Martin; viewers can appreciate the works’ notational precision while reading them as the abstract paintings they are. An innate sense of design infuses even Orozco’s most conceptual works. These large, overall compositions celebrate his admiration for Henri Matisse, who used relations of spacing and quantity to “draw with color.”

Additionally, there are works on paper that explore ingenious improvisations on Orozco’s repeated patterns. In one instance, he lends playful animation to a composition of concentric squares indebted to Josef Albers, using circles to suggest a lunar calendar; elsewhere, billowing skeins of gestural lines recall his “Breathing Drawings,” in which he closed his eyes and drew a line for the duration of one breath, recording shifts in pressure, akin to the pressure of fingers on keys during his piano improvisations. These are among the most engaging works in the show, but Orozco terms them “fictions” since they aren’t based on scores from the actual recordings.

The recordings—none more than six minutes long—play in the gallery, where the large canvases take his indirect translations to a different scale. All are titled with the time and place of recording, sometimes linked to the everyday context with subtitles, like “Running down the stairs” or “Abril’s doorbell.” The canvases tend to be sparse, given the small scale of the notations with respect to the overall field, but can get rich and dense, like 4 de Abril 2025, 15:54 hrs, Tokio (2025), where stately horizontal arrays of color compete with the white ground and lend monumental gravity to these meditative improvisations. The interwoven circles of 12 de Diciembre 2024, 13:36 hrs, San Angel, (Overlapping) (2025) engage the third dimension, suggesting the weight of a bas-relief and evoking his Calzada Flotante [Floating Causeway] (2023) in Chapultepec Park.

The paintings constitute unique “performances” of the scores (which are only available online), and the gallery provides technology allowing visitors to listen to Orozco’s improvisations while exploring his paintings via Vimeo. These digital files complete the elaborate migration of the “Samurai Tree,” like photographs preserving segments of time, by juxtaposing the recordings of original performances to their visual enactments. This compression eliminates the intermediary of the printed score and encourages free exploration of visual relationships within the recordings’ measured duration, an experience that recalls an earlier translation of the “Samurai Tree,” into cubes of carved limestone, the “Dés,” which Orozco undertook in collaboration with sculptors on Bali. Even as this series endowed its open-ended variations on squares and circles with physical weight, it made a case for the “Samurai Tree”’s elevation to Plato’s realm of ideas, where Orozco continues to explore its revelatory potential.