Gabriel Orozco’s currently exhibition at the Beaubourg presents some fantastic artworks by the Mexican artist, conceived from the early nineties to the present. Very sadly, their display pauperize them. The show’s architecture is formed by two long lines of sculptures on the centre of the room (one over tables and the other from the floor) together with actors and paintings, photographs, collages and drawings on the walls. The exhibition takes place at the Galerie Sud, where half of the walls are glass façades, allowing the passers-by of the street an external visualization of the show, inciting them to come inside and look at it closer. But in a large extent this closeness is never achieved, hence inside the gallery two guards insistently reminds the visitors of a generous black line on the floor around the sculptures not to be crossed. The duo wears Mexican police outfits, being themselves an artwork (Imported Guards, 2010), that surveil the pieces and teach the audience how to behave on a museum space.

This 50 cm large air-frontier is specially prejudicial with regards to the works on the three large wood tables queued close to the entrance. The first one is a working table, and unsurprisingly presents the tools and materials that composes the artist itinerant studio. The other two presents small dimensions sculptures, such as Horses Running Endlessly, 1995. This piece consists on a wood chessboard composed by knights only, where the average black and white opponents share the field with other two colours chessmen, each with their correspondent colour-square in the board. This beautiful piece suggests that despite the dichotomy defended voraciously in war situations (and increasingly outside of it as well), there is an entire subtle scale between us and them. For its proportion, this work can be fully appreciated from outside the keep-away line. However, the same is not true in respect to Dial Tone, a 1992 sculpture composed of telephone directory pages written with tiny characters. Unless the visitor reads the captions, which can be found both on the exhibition leaflet and on the entrance wall, or knows it from previously experiences, the piece is indecipherable. Whether this authoritarian distance is an intentional institutional critique or just lack of care is not important: the hiding strategy is successful in a narrative only as long as it doesn’t compromises the comprehension of the whole.

The variety of medias and versatility of materials within medias reinforces the artist multidisciplinary ability. Among the floor sculptures is Moon Tree, 1996, where circle white papers embraces – and will eventually fall with – the leaves of a two metres tall tree, overflowing poetry and delicacy. Hanged on the wall amid the photos is the simple and powerful diptych My Hands Are My Heart, 1991, where we see a naked male’s chest with his hands enclosing and hiding something in front of it; the next frame reveals the interior to be a heart of cleyey shaped with fingers, that the man now offers to the viewer. Although it is always a joy too see Orozco’s work, while presenting a small slice from each field of his practice the exhibition ended up being clunky: too small for a retrospective, too vast for an unpretentious show.