Gabriel Orozco Fleurs Fantomes

Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s eponymous, in situ work at Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire is the subject of this book, an installation inspired by the torn and faded remains of wallpapers and tapestries he found there, in rooms closed off and forgotten since 1938. These modest vestiges and extremely fragile traces of a living history captured Orozco’s imagination, and he was invited to devise an artistic intervention as part of a special commission. He meticulously studied the palimpsest of the floral motifs, photographing them in order to detect the traces of lives now long gone – a subtle mediation on space and time in matrix form, hanging on the blemished walls in plain sight.