335471 art of the loren WEB (1) - Flipbook - Page 126
Courbet’s Oak Tree
is an example of
Gabriel Orozco’s
ongoing exploration
of the circle and how
it mediates between
the geometric
and the organic,
wholeness and
fragmentation, stasis
and movement. By
applying his own
experiment with the
circle, Orozco offers
the viewer another
way of seeing one of
his favorite paintings
from art history-Gustave Courbet’s
The Oak at Flagey,
from 1864. Orozco
used the digital tools
of vector and raster to
deconstruct, divide,
and open up the
original images using
circles of varying
color, creating a data
structure based on
a grid but divided
Gabriel
Orozco
Courbet’s Oak Tree
2011
Pigment ink and
acrylic on canvas
35 1⁄8 × 44 ½ in.
Courtesy the
artist and Marian
Goodman Gallery
122
into dots. Orozco
then hand painted
layers of new dots
over the digitally
constructed structure.
This layering of the
dots in linear axels
creates pulsations of
color that optically
form larger grids.
The result is a new
reading of the image
without losing its
original makeup.
