NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler announced the representation of Mexican artist Jose Dávila (Guadalajara, 1974). For more than two decades, Dávila has established himself in the international art scene with a practice marked by his approach to language and sculptural tradition from a perspective centered on the articulation between "constructive will" and the physical principles that govern nature.
With the start of José Davila's representation, Nara Roesler hopes to strengthen relations between Latin American artists and institutions which will be marked by the realization of A pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king, the artist's first solo show in Brazil, which opens to the public on November 11.
Dávila has had more than sixty solo exhibitions, as well as frequently participating in relevant events and group exhibitions around the world, such as the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 13th Havana Biennale (2019), and the 10th Mercosur Biennale (2015). An award-winning artist whose work is present in several institutional collections, he was awarded the Baltic Artists' Award in 2017 and, the previous year, in 2016, he was Artist Honorée of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., United States, among others.
Dávila has developed a keen eye for space and the analysis of physical forces such as mass, balance, and materiality. The artist uses basic elements of drawing, such as point, line, and plane, to create constructions that test notions of stability and permanence. His works are often capable of transforming our spatial perception, mainly through the visual attention created by his arrangements. The materials used by the artist are the most fundamental, such as stone and ceramics, which gave rise to the first human utensils, as well as plaster, paper and cardboard, and industrialized materials such as glass, metal, and concrete. In his sculptural work, the specificity of the materials used, their origin, their symbolic value, and their formal characteristics are essential. Dávila looks at oppositions from different perspectives. He makes use of the association between image and word, also constructing arrangements that vary between harmony and disorder, fragility and resistance, calm and tension.
His formal repertoire establishes dialogues with the history of art, especially the modern sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, and it also establishes connections with Vladimir Tatlin's Russian Constructivism and the modular procedures of Donald Judd's minimalist sculpture. The field of references runs through the pictorial field, drawing inspiration from Joseph Albers' color field painting for the creation of his mobiles, and appropriating the works of Pablo Picasso and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, in his Cut-outs series.
It can be said that Dávila's work is essentially multidisciplinary, as in addition to sculptures, objects, installations, and interventions, he makes use of two-dimensional supports. These pictorial, graphic, and sculptural languages are reconfigured in contradictory and contrasting relationships, pushing the correspondence between form and content to the limit. Dávila's production highlights the processes and dynamics necessary for things to maintain their shape and occupy space in a specific and determined way.
