José Dávila, artist: “People like to identify things easily. The fair thing is to make it difficult for him”

At the age of 19, José Dávila received a photo developing studio from his father.

The boy's gaze, which even then was oriented towards the plastic arts, due to his own concern and due to his habitual visits to the neighbor two houses to the left, the important Mexican architect Fernando González Cortázar, sharpened with that gift.

Before his lens, the Colonia Providencia neighborhood in Guadalajara (Mexico), an everyday place full of everyday junk and signs, became a quarry of sculptural and architectural forms that the young man could isolate from its context, capture in photography, and study by hand. your account.

That was 1993. Today, José Dávila (Guadalajara, Mexico, 49 years old) has established himself as one of the original extras of the boom that contemporary Latin art has experienced in recent decades.

And as one of his most admired, thanks to sculptures precisely halfway between art and architecture (a career he studied), works, each year more solid and delicate, that discuss form, function and material;

tension and balance, gravity and resistance.

What has not changed is that this gentleman with a shy expression and wandering gaze continues to look for inspiration on the streets.

Now he does it in that long hour of walking between his house and his studio, in Barrio Artesanos (Chimalhuacán).

“I am a born accumulator of objects and things.

I feel that when I start making a sculpture, I start it when I pick up a brick from the street”, he explains.

The brick, by the way, is not a metaphor.

“I like the ones that have been partially painted.

Painting a single-sided cement wall is an incredible spatial and geometric game and creates great possibilities with a very simple gesture.

I found some on the street that were painted white and in a rather deteriorated state.

Look, there's one here, actually."

is Madrid, and specifically the Travesía Cuatro gallery, where Dávila exhibits his latest works until April 22, in a compilation called

.

The work 'Fragile Construction I', by José Dávila: "I had wanted to play with the idea of ​​the pendular weight for a long time. And specifically with river stones, with a very peculiar shape, very worn by the movement of nature by hundreds or thousands of years. The piece is sculpted by nature."ÁNGELA SUÁREZ

And here it is, indeed, the brick in question, part of the work

trapped under a rock and on top of a piece of wood, a concrete block, two metal beams separated by another rock and, to prevent all this First it collapses, a tiny river stone hanging by a thread.

It is an almost emblematic work of Dávila's recent style, where he still shows his fascination for the tactility of Cy Twombly, the almost architectural look of Gordon Matta Clark, the murals of Sol Levitt or Richard Serra himself, whom Dávila studied at the Escuela Tapatía de Arquitectura, but which also begins to evoke the New York minimalism of the sixties.

"It's because of the color palette, which is, let's say,

[by Donald Judd],” the artist argues, pointing to the orange-red (cadmium red) of the beams in another work,

“Many times I had made sculptures of this type where I left the metal bare and on this occasion I wanted to experiment with the function of painting towards sculpture”.

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The exhibition, of eight works, gives an almost meridian vision of Dávila's current style, which is not something intentional, but rather unavoidable since it was so unintentional.

“It's a kind of summary that integrates many of the topics I've been working on recently, like a transfer of the work I do every day in my studio,” he explains.

“It was like opening the studio door and bringing that here.

I didn't want to generate a particular narrative, but just say: 'This is what I'm working on and that's what comes to the gallery.'

The work 'Fragile Construction III', by José Dávila.ÁNGELA SUÁREZ

In all of them, they play to refine something as primitive as placing materials one on top of the other, a constant in Dávila's work.

There aren't many more.

The norm is that nothing comes close to what he himself has done in the last 20 years.

"I respect a lot, I'm not just saying it, artists who do the same thing all their lives, but it's not my case," he defends himself.

“I find work as a constant exploration and search to keep myself entertained, active, restless.

Highly strung.

That leads you to the fact that the language is changing.

People like to be able to identify something easily, so this is not what they like best.

But it is fair that this identification is not easy”.

Later, speaking of something else, he will say a phrase that illustrates this whole process: "I think like a child, someone who is playing all the time."

Detail of the work 'Fragile Construction II', by José Dávila.ÁNGELA SUÁREZ

With that phrase, Dávila was defending himself from that label that is frequently attached to him, given the jungle of structures that is his work, that of an architect who makes art.

“There is a very architectural grammar in my head, which has to do with my academic period as an architect.

However, I never worked as such.

I simply studied it for five years, I have my diploma, and I have been dedicated to the plastic arts for 23 years ”, he said.

You can indeed find references to architects in his work, especially Le Corbusier or Mies van der Roe, and that mystique of progress, that future (now past) and those ideals that, the world being as it is, it is more elegant to question.

"I don't know if so much order has done us good," adds Dávila.

“You can see it in some town that was made organically, self-built by non-architects, let's say.

And suddenly,

you can find perfectly well organized cities that sometimes I think lack a little or a lot of soul.

The great failure of modernity, in my view, is that it fails to transport the soul that was in ignorance to order”.

Hence the extremes seen in the exhibition.

The primitive and the industrialized;

the solid and the fragile;

the tense and the balanced.

All this can be counted on with a beam that supports a rock filed down by the river.

“Perhaps the most important issue that I have been working on in general is tension and dialogue”, he illustrates.

“It has always seemed important to me that sculpture is a place for dialogue.

That the materials, which are sometimes, or may seem, totally dispersed or even antagonistic, find a place in the work to dialogue and try to understand each other”.