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CASEY FATCHETT
THE ART NEWSPAPER ART BASEL/MIAMI BEACH DAILY EDITION 4 DECEMBER 2008 13
Artists at Art Positions
José Dávila: cutting-edge
container
Until recently, the Mexican
artist José Dávila, who lives
and works in Guadalajara, has
found a warmer embrace from
the dealers of Europe than
those of America. But that
changed recently when the
Renwick Gallery in New York
became his US gallery. After
his first solo show there in
May, Dávila was accepted for
Art Positions at Art Basel
Miami Beach.
His work for Renwick
(P18) is a shipping container
sliced up into a series of equalsized
shallow boxes evenly
spaced with alternating voids.
“I wanted to make a game of
proportions and mathematical
relationships,” said Dávila,
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PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO, DIRECTOR
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,NEW YORK
who was influenced by
Donald Judd’s “Stacks” series.
“Like Judd, I wanted ten
evenly sized boxes with gaps
in between, but my work has
blown it up in scale and I have
kept the container on its side
so that it ‘stacks’ horizontally.”
Dávila has transformed the
container from a room in
which to display works of art to
a work of art in its own right.
The outside has been sprayed
with blue car paint, the inside
with grey. Although the
container is highly visible
squeezed between its orangecoloured
neighbours, it comes
into its own when the Miami
sun creates a chiaroscuro of
architectural rigour. V.L.
Drew Heitzler:
tree of a kind
The palm trees lining the
streets of Los Angeles are as
evocative of the West Coast as
the Hollywood sign. But many
of the trees are nearly 100
years old, and their days are
numbered. The Los Angelesbased
artist Drew Heitzler has
been moved by their imminent
demise to such an extent that
he has “brought” one to Art
Positions. It can be found
outside Redling Fine Art’s
container (P15), painted a
funereal black and looking
rather forlorn. Heitzler was
busy sprucing up Untitled
(Mexican Fan Palm), 2008,
($35,000) in the hours before
the opening of Art Positions.
The recent bad weather has
given the tree quite a battering,
so fronds and coconuts had to
be re-affixed with heavy-duty
tape. The artist has used
considerable artistic licence to
make the arboreal sculpture.
Rather than the Canary Island
type that is dying off in Los
Angeles, the tree is instead a
thriving Mexican variety.
Moreover, the transplant
has come from South
Carolina, and not Southern
California. J.P.
Federico Díaz: winter wonderland
A chance encounter on a night
flight from Paris to New York
changed artist Federico
Díaz’s life. He got into a brief
conversation with an urbane
American, who gave him his
business card and told him to
call. The man was Robert
Buck, a former director of the
Brooklyn Museum.
Fast-forward 18 months
and the half-Argentine, half-
Czech artist has designed the
central floor/bar area at Art
Charlie Hammond:
tradition turned
upside down
Scottish gallerist Sorcha Dallas
is presenting the work of
painter Charlie Hammond at
her container in Art Positions
(P1). It is the most traditional
work on view—the paintings
are framed oils on canvas—but
Hammond undermines the
pristine surface of the paint by
scraping it with paintbrushes
strapped to drills. Portrait with
a Black Eye, 2006-08, is
priced at £4,000. He also
chops out wedges of paint to
resemble pie charts, a
recurring theme in several of
his works. These geometric
shapes can be read as
patterns, figures or faces, and
it is significant that Hammond
studied at Glasgow School of
Art, where the figurative
tradition was re-born in the
“Man aged 45 gunned down
by persons unknown,
Culiacán, 20 September 2007
at 10.30 hours.” In front of the
unsentimental prose of a
Mexican police report lies
jewellery studded with fake
diamonds and shards of glass,
the latter the remains of the
windscreen of the victim’s
pick-up truck. Part of a series
entitled “21”, 2008, by the
artist Teresa Margolles, which
Positions for Art Radio
International and PS1
Contemporary Art Center in
New York, the MoMA
affiliate that is headed up by
Alanna Heiss, who happens to
be a friend of Mr Buck.
From his Prague studio
Díaz has created what at first
sight looks like a winter
wonderland but is actually a
high-tech, multi-platform
installation that represents
vibrations and radio
early 1980s with the “New
Glasgow Boys” group of
artists such as Peter Howson
and Ken Currie. Hammond
renders the human figure
down to basic geometric
elements and cites his greatest
influences as the artist Jean
Dubuffet and the situationists
of the 1960s.
Sorcha Dallas is also
showing Hammond’s plaster
and ceramic works. The
artist’s humour comes
through in the crumpled,
ceramic bottles that recall a
Cézanne still-life, which are
scattered around the floor.
“This is a joke about art show
opening nights,” says Dallas.
“They start off so formal but
often end up completely
debauched.” V.L.
frequencies in direct reference
to Díaz’s Art Radio
collaborators. The white floor
has amoebic black contour
lines throughout and glacierlike
mounds of polystyrene
rise from it in layers. Some of
these are studded with
fragmented black rubber
tubes that, when viewed from
above, join up and
foreshorten to mimic the
floor’s contour lines.
There are evening light
Teresa Margolles: CSI Mexico
is meant to express her
outrage at the ongoing
slaughter caused by gang
warfare, the bracelet is
presented in an elegant vitrine
as if in an upmarket jewellery
shop. Within Galería Salvador
Díaz’s (P14) container there
are ten showcases (priced at
€20,000 each), representing
ten police bulletins,
displaying 21 memento mori
of lives cut short, all
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shows throughout the week,
with music streaming from
the DJ’s booth through
speakers implanted in the
mounds, and psychedelic
1960s films projected
overhead. An interactive light
projection evades, chases and
captures visitors’ every move.
A collector would need to
cover production costs of
$300,000 to re-install the
work at home.
Viv Lawes
encrusted with shattered glass
collected from the crime
scene by Margolles’ family
and friends. The artist, who
was born in Culiacán and
lives in Mexico City, then
takes the broken crystals to a
local jeweller, whose best
customers are often ironically
the hit men themselves. The
result is conceptual bling as
mourning jewellery.
Javier Pes
CASEY FATCHETT
CASEY FATCHETT