Background
Jose Dávila was born in 1974 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Jose Dávila was born in 1974 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
In 1993 Jose studied Sculpture at Fine Arts Academy in San Miguel De Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. During 1993 - 1998 he studied at Architecture Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente.
Jose Dávila works in a range of media — including sculpture, installation, collage and photography — to explore both material and form, often appropriating and re-contextualising history and architecture. Davila's works are both odes and critiques to the artists and architects that came before him. In his ongoing series "Homage to the Square" Josef Albers' paintings, in which squares of different colours are nested one inside the other, are reinterpreted as three-dimensional mobiles of nested square frames. While Albers used his paintings to consider the interpretation of colours when viewed in relationship to each other, Dávila's work presents the square and its colours as an exploration of form and shadow, reinterpreting Albers' exploration as a sculptural pursuit.
In works such as "Buildings You Must See Before You Die", created in 2008, and "Chronological history of sculpture", created in 2013, the artist's photographs of famous buildings and monuments are cut out, such that the very building or sculpture or artwork that warranted the initial image is deleted from the picture plane. In one photograph for example, there is a bean-shaped absence in Chicago where Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" should be.
In September 2017, the artist's work "Sense of Place" — commissioned by Los Angeles Nomadic Division — was unveiled. Initially a six-tonne cube of Tetris-like pieces the work was gradually disassembled into 40 individual pieces and moved through the city to 20 separate sites. In each new location the pieces became a sculpture whose function was decided by the community. By portioning out the sculpture and moving it through the range of Los Angeles' diverse landscapes, the layers of Los Angeles historically, geographically and socially were traversed. Later, the pieces were reunited in their original West Hollywood Park location. In "Sense of Place" — as well as "Buildings You Must See Before You Die" and "Chronological history of sculpture" — the space around the art and architecture becomes a core participant in and influencer of the art and architecture itself. Currently, Dávila's works are included in major collections such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Mudam Luxembourg.
Jose thinks to be an artist and to pursue art professionally is already a political stance. He personally likes to have an engagement with his community as a person and citizen. But he doesn’t like to make his work talk about politics. He wants it to have its own nature.
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 multidisciplinary work often departs from the creation of a visual glossary where all variations are the result of a basic idea; in their arrangement, these basic forms become a language for the totality of the work. Each of the pieces evolve naturally within the specific conditions and characteristics of their format and material.
Quotations: “There is something poetic in failure and in our limitations because we live with a modernism that is not preserved, where we see buildings that have abandoned or demolished and others have been badly remodeled.”
