Designed by Arno Baudin in collaboration with Gabriel Orozco
 
240 x 175 mm, two volume hardback, slipcase
1034 pages (volume one); 414 pages (volume two), colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 979-8-9860930-4-8
Published by Zolo Press, 2023
 
Published as two volumes in a first edition of 2,000 copies, this unique artist’s book compiles the ‘Diario de Plantas’ series (2021–22) by Gabriel Orozco. Related to a group of exhibitions, including the eponymous solo presentation at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London (October – November 2022), these volumes are dedicated to Orozco’s gouache, tempera, ink and graphite works on paper.

Diario de Plantas comprises 724 drawings made by Orozco in Tokyo and Acapulco on 33 notebooks between November 2021 and April 2022. Reproduced at their original scale on bible paper, these drawings blend the geometries of biological diagrams with the lush impressionism delivered by the petals, leaves and fronds themselves. Compiling page upon page of verdancy, these volumes create a palimpsest of similar yet distinct images at turns fibrous and porous. In these depictions of collective cellular life, this artist’s book is less an encyclopaedic rendering of nature than an ecosystem of permeating forms. As Briony Fer writes, Orozco’s sketches generate ‘their own form of automatic drawing as a combination of graphic pressures and chromatic flows.’ Akin to a form of writing, this body of work is intensified by the temporal structure of a ‘diary’, where everyday encounters are devoted to the life of plants.