Painted Theory or Theoretical Painting: Orozco and the Psychoanalytic Discourse

An Abstract

The artworks of Gabriel Orozco allow various theoretical readings, of which we find formalistic, political, or iconographic interpretations. The former examinations as many others, strive to extricate universal meanings out of artistic corpus, in the attempt of orchestrating them into a singular theoretical model. A second observation however, suggests that while attempting to render an integrative theoretical model, these interpretations reveal an opposing reality: the artworks inability to be posited under a single coherent theory, and the method by which these works construct something of which exists in-between, which refuses any unification or generalization.
The former refusal for any theoretical fixation, in which I debate within this paper, does not necessarily posit a problem to be resolved, but rather outlines the possibility of pondering upon a productive relationship between theory and praxis, in which none of the above generalize or overcome the other. In order to develop the previously mentioned possibility I would like to turn to the psychoanalytic discourse of Freud and Lacan on interpretation and revisit Orozco's works with regards to these insights.