Not all those who wander are lost

Exposición / Travesia Cuatro / San Mateo, 16 / Madrid, España
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Cuándo:
13 sep de 2018 - 10 nov de 2018

Inauguración:
13 sep de 2018

Organizada por:
Travesia Cuatro

Artistas participantes:
Jose Dávila

       

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Descripción de la Exposición

The exhibition will be on view from September 13th until the 10th of November 2018. In addition to this and on the occasion of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, Travesía Cuatro will present an installation of sculptures by the artist at Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden from September 12th to 16th. Both exhibitions will present a parallel research by the artist within sculptural and pictorial language. At Madrid's Royal Botanical Garden Jose Dávila will construct an accumulative glyptotheque that summarizes both materially and formally the recurring elements that can be found throughout the history of sculpture. In the same way that William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin used the cut-up technique in order to produce new written works with cropped and re-arranged text, Dávila develops a similar procedure by creating vertical compositions like totems that expand the definition of sculpture by merging organic and industrial materials, found objects, minimal, figurative and classical elements. The exhibition at Travesía Cuatro will bring together a group of paintings and silkscreens, in which a series of scientific texts are interrupted and contradicted by abstract forms that are reminiscent to modernist geometric art and neo-concrete graphics. The elements conforming these works are specific references or citations from his awareness on Art History, however, the result allows for an intersubjective exchange with the public in which the superimposition of graphics and text creates a free flow of associations and ideas from where new meaning can occur. His art making contributes to a different perception and intelligibility of the world, in an exercise that sparks our own sensorial and visual memory and addresses the concrete capacity of language to emulate and conduct human perception in the most essential level. The work of Jose Dávila (Guadalajara, 1974) is the result, on one hand, of taking the resistance of both form and material to its limit, and on the other, of the appropriation and recontextualization of poignant works of art throughout history, defining them within a local and contemporary context. Dávila’s work shows apparently opposed materials where forces and forms are balanced to achieve a harmonious whole that transforms his creations into representations of our doubts and own contradictions. His work is a visual and material aporia, an insoluble logical paradox, where we discover a coexistence of fragility and resistance, calm and tension, geometry and chaos. His sculptures are a reflection of the phenomenon of gravity, the laws of static and dynamic energy, the tractive force used to generate motion and the compression strength, the potential for deformation prior to the rupture of materials, and, above all, of structural intuitions. The assembly of delicately balanced materials highlight the human intervention that transforms the space and re-signifies the object. The structures created by Dávila work within their own logic in the search for the exogenous center of gravity and in the limits of the resistance of the materials, where the form is a consequence of the process. Jose Dávila studied architecture in the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente in Guadalajara, Mexico, however, he considers himself a self-taught artist, with an intuitive formation. His work has been exhibited at Museo del 900 in Florence, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE; Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, USA; Savannah College of Art and Design; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; Museum Voorlinden, AG Wassenaar, Nederland; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo MUAC, Mexico City; Caixa Forum, Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; Kunstwerke, Berlin; San Diego Museum of Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; MAK, Vienna, Fundación/ Colección JUMEX, Mexico City; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Museu do Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo; The Moore Space, Miami; NICC, Antwerp, among others; and has been featured in international publications such as Cream 3, ed. Phaidon, 100 Latin-American Artists, ed. Exit and The Feather and The Elephant, ed. Hatje Cantz. Jose Dávila has been the recipient of support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Kunstwerke in Berlin and the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, México. In 2017 he was awarded with the Baltic Artists’ Award along with artists Eric N. Mack, Toni Schmale and Shen Xin. His public art project Sense of Place was part of the Getty Foundation’s PST LA/LA Triennale in Los Angeles in 2017/2018.

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