José Dávila, suspended time in sculpture

Mahón,

This summer, the Madrid Gallery Albarrán Bourdais will give a break to its exhibition activity in the capital, but not to its proposals in Teruel, where on June 15 it opened its only Sculpture Trail, an outdoor sculpture park that houses works of art and new productions created specifically in dialogue with the landscape of Matarraña, and in its headquarters in Menorca.

In this last space we can visit its first exhibition dedicated to the Mexican José Dávila, “Essay of Permanence”, which consists of recent paintings and sculptures, some of the latter elaborated with local materials of the island and linked most to their studies on concepts such as balance, severity, structural fragility and resistance architecture.

Dávila formed first as an architect, hence he has sought to continually invoke the two -dimensional origin of his creations and transpose the fundamental principles of drawing and construction to the three -dimensional space, highlighting the physical mechanisms that enable objects to sustain themselves and occupy a place in a certain environment.

Its starting point, and from there the appropriate presentation of this sample in Menorca, have been the megalithic structures – such as the Talayotic – that conceives as primary gestures of occupation of the territory and observation of the cosmos, of human relationship with the matter.

We will contemplate first, on the ground floor, the series Fundamental restlessnesscomposed of sculptures that remember the ancestral act of placing objects, such as a stone, in space. Based on combinations of contradictory appearance, it raises cases of unstable equilibrium in which gravity defines and creates forms. Sacha Craddock explains, in this sense, that Dávila’s works sprout from work with the counterweight and that do not hide the mechanism that supports them, and therefore, the tension between the stable and the precarious, the resistant and the fragile.

In addition to our ancestors, they are related to formal developments of minimalism and conceptual art: reinterpret current materials (cement, stone, steel), to grant new meanings derived from interaction with space. Another of them is the Marés, the local stone of Menorca, which serves to underline the ties between material, context and memory and associate its symbolic weight with the physique.

José Dávila. Permanence test. Albarrán Bourdais Menorca

We will also see paintings from your series Fragmentations of interior spaceexecuted on raw linen canvases. Dávila framed in them negatives of primary geometric shapes (circles, squares, triangles) delimited by white pigment applications. The contrast between the organic and geometric stroke and the geometric structure suggests reflections on the processes of construction of meaning from resources such as repetition, variation and interpretation and also affects the wealth of these interior spaces, even in a metaphorical sense.

Suspended in the central courtyard, we will appreciate the mobile Tribute to the squarethat from the same title pays tribute to Josef Albers. It is formed by concentric squares divided into blue and orange gray ranges, reinterpreting the chromatic inquiries of which he was a teacher of the Black Mountain College and carrying his two -dimensional studies to a three -dimensional body in constant motion.

It is part of a series of mobile phones that the Mexican has developed in recent projects, such as his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Japanese, where he approached the relativity of perception, gravity and time as a sculptural matter.

Finally, already on the second floor, we will contemplate another suspended installation created with river stones, a wooden trunk and a painted beam, which jointly outlit a silent choreography of opposing forces. The disposition of each of those elements, tensioned in the air, points to a suspended temporality, a latent transformation state with connotations, again, symbolic about the vulnerable of our relationship with the natural environment.

Menorca is not the only sample that Dávila stars this summer. The Zapopán Museum of Art (Guadalajara, Mexico) dedicates a retrospective; He also exposes in Desert X, in Coachella, and is part of the route of the aforementioned only Sculpture Trail.