Gabriel Orozco, Tate Modern, London

Mortality versus order: Gabriel Orozco’s ‘Kites’ (1997)

When Gabriel Orozco found an old Citroën DS in a Paris scrapyard in 1993, he made an icon out of an icon. He cut the car in three, removed the central part (and the engine) and put the remaining pieces back together as a compressed paradox: a vehicle leaner and more aerodynamic looking than ever, but transformed into a static art object.

The hilarious “La DS” (in French, déesse, goddess) stands at the centre of Tate Modern’s new retrospective of the 48-year-old Mexican artist, and no visitor can fail to be delighted by its elegance and imaginative wit. It riffs on modernism’s infatuation with technology and collapsed dreams, echoes surrealism’s assault on reality and, most powerfully, co-opts for visual art the disorientating craziness of the everyday that characterises the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez.

Yet, in more ways than intended, the grounded “DS” is also a symbol of Orozco’s entire oeuvre: stylish, erudite – and going nowhere. At Tate, it stands next door to the only other memorable work in the show: “Kites” (1997), a human skull overdrawn in graphite with a black and white chessboard grid. That work has a feather-light touch and incongruity – mortality versus order – more intriguing than Damien Hirst’s celebrated diamond skull. But for all its charm, “Kites” embodies the limits of Orozco’s vision: life and death explored as a game, cultural history from the Aztecs to Marcel Duchamp (a chess champion) reconfigured in an art at once too playful and too derivative to provoke feeling.

With pieces such as “Empty Shoe Box” – exactly that – and the photograph “Breath on Piano”, recording a trace of Orozco’s breath on the shiny surface, Tate shows why Orozco became art world darling of the 1990s. Favouring the ephemeral and the weightless, and recalling minimalism’s purity of gesture, he became a focus for the reaction against the Sturm-und-Drang return to painting and heavy consumption that had dominated the 1980s.

He was also global, working in Mexico, New York, Paris at the time when the biennale circuit began to challenge the museum as forger of artistic reputations. Tate calls “Yielding Stone” (1992), a large ball of plasticine of Orozco’s own weight, rolled in the streets to acquire dust and debris, “the artist’s self-portrait during that decade – constantly on the move, always receptive to new environments and experiences”. It is the sort of conceptual piece beloved of curators: deadpan, democratic, making no distinction between art and life, and visually dull.

Like all conceptual artists, Orozco goes back to Duchamp. “Four Bicycles”, an assemblage of iron and wheels where the different vehicles balance precariously, and “Horses Running Endlessly”, an enlarged chessboard populated only by knights, are both homages. Both too are about meaninglessness and frustration – wheels circling fruitlessly in the air, identikit horses running to remain, Red Queen-style, in the same place, in a game with no goal.

It is a truism that an art of the absurd is impossibly difficult to sustain: the thrill of that first anarchic intervention – Lewis Carroll’s wonderland, Duchamp’s urinal, Hirst’s shark – cannot be repeated, which is why so many radical conceptual careers, including Duchamp’s and, on current evidence, Hirst’s, peter out so unsatisfactorily. Orozco’s was a more superficial talent from the start and, especially as expressed in his recent work, does not begin to bear the weight of a museum retrospective.

Tate’s is bulked out with lots of unexciting photographs – a series illustrating matching scooters, “Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe”, surrounds “La DS” – and with arte povera remixes such as “Lintels” (2001), made of lint from washing machines, and “Chicotes” (2010), spirals of burst car tyres assembled on the floor. The tedious geometric blue, red and white circles on gold leaf – the “Samurai Tree” paintings (2006-07) – were, Orozco says, created “to disappoint”. This is a feeble excuse. What Tate tells is the story of an artist whose lightness of being, matured and turned to profit by galleries and institutions, has become merely lightweight.

Until April 25.

Sponsored by Fundación Televisa and the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta), Mexico.

www.tate.org.uk