Jose Dávila: COMMA 03 Essay by Cristián Silva - Bloomberg Space
Jose Dávila: COMMA 03 Essay by Cristián Silva - Bloomberg Space
Jose Dávila: COMMA 03 Essay by Cristián Silva - Bloomberg Space
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<strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong>: <strong>COMMA</strong> <strong>03</strong><br />
<strong>Essay</strong> <strong>by</strong> <strong>Cristián</strong> <strong>Silva</strong><br />
<strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong>: <strong>COMMA</strong> <strong>03</strong><br />
Kaleidoscope<br />
Opening times<br />
Mon - Sat, 11:00 - 18:00<br />
<strong>Bloomberg</strong> SPACE<br />
50 Finsbury Square<br />
London, EC2A 1HD<br />
gallery@bloomberg.net<br />
After decades of intense debate surrounding post-colonialism, artists from the so-called<br />
peripheries often still find themselves having to live up to certain expectations about where their<br />
art is produced, what kind of socio-political circumstances it responds to, or what local audiences it<br />
is aimed at. <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong> is an artist born and living in Guadalajara, Mexico; a nation gifted with<br />
striking landscapes, abundant natural resources, and one of the most complex, distinctive and rich<br />
folkloric traditions in the world, it is also a country deeply affected <strong>by</strong> extreme inequity, poverty,<br />
illiteracy, violence, corruption and impunity.<br />
Trained originally as an architect, and having been touched during his professional life <strong>by</strong> all the<br />
contradictions, fractures and tensions inherent to an underdeveloped society, <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong> has<br />
managed however to cultivate an artistic language that subtly responds to the troubled<br />
aforementioned circumstances from a tangentially poetic perspective.<br />
Acting like a visionary magpie that dives into a toxic dump looking for precious morsels, his loot<br />
includes devices from the Neo-Concretes, the Situationists and Oulipo amongst others. This<br />
convulsed context is then filtered, translated and assembled into a system of visual operations that<br />
include geometry, colour, chance and calculation as its main driving forces. Instead of<br />
emphasising - and in turn, deriving profit from - misery (as seen in much recent Latin American<br />
art), <strong>Dávila</strong>’s perspective tackles and nurtures specific intrinsic concerns, generally centered<br />
around historic development of the visual arts.<br />
Recently, one of the unspoken quid pro quo in the art world has been that a Mexican<br />
contemporary artist will dutifully generate references to abandonment, anguish, desolation,<br />
distress or pain in his work. But <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong> - along with kindred artists Iñaki Bonillas, Stefan<br />
Brüggemann, Tercerunquinto or Francisco Ugarte, amongst others - has overturned this approach<br />
with a natural psychologically inverse reaction. He has explored imagination, knowledge and skill<br />
in an attempt to replace ugliness with beauty, chaos with equilibrium, excess with measure – a<br />
contemporary take on the Prayer to St Francis: “where there is despair, hope; where there is<br />
darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy”.<br />
It is well-known that Mexico’s current administration champions art that fosters a safe, clean and<br />
attractive image of Mexico. It is also evident to most that all this sharply contrasts with the
ubiquitous social crisis; crime and drug dealing being the most prominent of innumerable issues.<br />
<strong>Dávila</strong>’s devotion to aesthetic refinement should definitely not be confused with this propagandadriven<br />
centralised master plan (nor with the ornamental, market-oriented, opportunistic proposals<br />
and discourses of some other Latin American artists navigating the global art scene).<br />
<strong>Dávila</strong> does not subscribe to illustrative nor didactic procedures. Instead, he drills down into how<br />
everyday materials can act as media for translating emotions or ideas. This may relate to the<br />
power dynamics in the ever-dwindling scheme of the centre and periphery, but has aspirations<br />
beyond this, in the terrain of the sentimental and the intimate.<br />
The Sierpinski Variable (2009), <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong>’s recent commission for <strong>Bloomberg</strong> SPACE in<br />
London, presents an eloquent large-scale constellation of suspended geometrical shapes.<br />
Conceived as the evolution of two of the artist’s previous projects (<strong>Space</strong> after <strong>Space</strong>, 2007, and<br />
Flying City, 2008), this new site-specific installation continues to explore <strong>Dávila</strong>’s recurring<br />
fascination with levitating and disintegrating structures.<br />
The basic units of the composition are hexagonal MDF frames. The inside of these frames are<br />
illuminated with fluorescent tubes, somehow reminiscent of corporate office light fixtures. Each<br />
one of the hexagons is missing at least one of its sides, giving way to the visual permeability of the<br />
group. Partly because of this, light becomes the inter-connective tissue between the fragments,<br />
time becomes part of the structure and formal dynamics between the units start to unfold as we<br />
physically travel through the piece. Through a severe yet flexible game of adding and subtracting,<br />
<strong>Dávila</strong> has carefully arranged these elements in a fashion that can be considered stochastic:<br />
simultaneously premeditated and random.<br />
On each outside face of the panels, it is possible to see a white chalk-like line drawn diagonally<br />
from corner to corner, evoking the instructive marks workers make on buildings under<br />
construction. These simple marks not only suggest its “work-in-progress quality”, they also trigger<br />
some sort of fractalisation of its geometric principles: the title of this piece comes precisely from<br />
the way this visual sequence/pattern is unchained and derives from such single gesture.<br />
There are some immediate impressions the viewer may be left with: a broken-up suspended<br />
la<strong>by</strong>rinth, a floating scaffolding device, a three-dimensional archipelago, an abandoned<br />
amusement park carousel, a kaleidoscope, a school of still, sub-aquatic creatures. The feeling of a<br />
science-fiction environment is also rather palpable, yet there is something warm and familiar about<br />
this piece that probably has to do with the gentle orchestration of proportions, shapes and<br />
materials.<br />
Many references come to mind as to where this piece’s inspiration may come from. Besides<br />
<strong>Dávila</strong>’s natural inclination for Western architectural history, there might also be unconscious links<br />
to Native American imagery. Particularly resonant are the Huichol fractal patterns, rooted in native<br />
spirituality and often reflected in their colourful dress and other art forms, ancient shamanic
practices, and mythical ceremonial traditions. In the light of the fact that the artist is himself a<br />
descendant of the Kickapoo people of Northern Mexico, this relationship is perfectly plausible.<br />
In his 1970 film A Man Called Horse (coincidentally shot in Durango, Mexico), Elliot Silverstein<br />
provides an image that has become indelible to most of <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong>’s generation: inside a dimly lit<br />
cavernous tipi, a white man hangs dramatically from bone daggers pierced through the skin of his<br />
chest. This ritual, apparently a Sioux rite of passage referred to in this film as “Vow to the Sun”,<br />
might perhaps be considered another reference to The Sierpinski Variable, in all of its magical and<br />
hallucinatory representation of transcendence through sacrifice.<br />
A less solemn precedent to this piece can be found in a Mexican TV musical variety show called<br />
Siempre en Domingo; immensely popular for over three decades among worldwide Spanishspeaking<br />
audiences, the lively yet garish sets and stage designs of this show have been<br />
occasionally mentioned <strong>by</strong> <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong> as a peculiar childhood memory, in some ways influential<br />
in the making of this recent work.<br />
Ancestral, historical, mediatic, urbanistic and also artistic references converge in this project.<br />
Among the latter, Helio Oiticica’s Nucleus and Grand Nucleus series provide a manifest<br />
precedent, in its interactive exploration of geometry and color in three dimensions. Also, although<br />
less symmetrical, there is a combination of a tranquil, soothing and charming presence in Davila’s<br />
The Sierpinski Variable that we usually find in many pieces <strong>by</strong> Félix González-Torres. On the other<br />
hand, specific cultural and political junctures related to Latin American recent history, find an<br />
eloquent voice through Bruce Nauman’s South American Triangle, the renowned welded steel<br />
piece from the 1981 series of the artist’s comments on the southern hemisphere’s torture and<br />
oppression. It can be said that <strong>Dávila</strong>’s current piece on view at <strong>Bloomberg</strong> SPACE channels an<br />
energy that can operate as a dynamic bridge between these last two references.<br />
The Sierpinski Variable, one of <strong>Jose</strong> <strong>Dávila</strong>’s most sophisticated projects to date, will hopefully be<br />
read as a rational and formal exercise that takes abstraction to another level, one of affection, as<br />
well as humanistic and social concern; a public piece that will hopefully incite contemplation and<br />
interaction, spirituality and physical dynamism.<br />
<strong>Cristián</strong> <strong>Silva</strong><br />
<strong>Cristián</strong> <strong>Silva</strong> is a visual artist born in Chile.