Continuous Space V. Jose Dávila
File
Davila’s proposal, Espacio continuo [Continuous Space], is a sculpture without a beginning nor an end characterised by its spatiality, which invites the viewer to move inside the work itself so that it can be fully grasped. The work glides outside of the architectural boundaries, transforming the Espazo Anexo in an annexe of the street and modifying its surroundings, contagiously becoming urban furniture.
Considering that this work is completely open to the exterior, there is no opening and closing hours of the exhibition gallery at Espazo Anexo. However, members of MARCO staff are, as usual, available to provide visitors with information, in addition to the regular guided tours:
• Every day at 6 pm
• ‘A la carte’ tours for groups, by appointment at the tel. 986 113 900
Coming soon, after the series ‘PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO/MEETING POINTS’’, the MARCO will publish a trilingual catalogue (Galician-Spanish-English) including the documentation of each of the projects, the artist’s biographies, images of the works in exhibition, curatorial text and texts by each of the artists, commissioned to Ricardo Nicolau (Pedro Barateiro), María Peña (a conversation with Manuel Eirís), Virginia Torrente (a conversation with Carlos Bunga), Agar Ledo (a conversation with Nicolás Combarro), and Montserrat Albores (Jose Dávila).
Summary
With the exhibition by Mexican artist Jose Dávila (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974) finalises the project ‘PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO / MEETING POINTS’, produced by MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, for the Espazo Anexo, and curated by Agar Ledo Arias, Head of the Exhibitions Department. Throughout 2009, five artists —Pedro Barateiro, Manuel Eirís, Carlos Bunga, Nicolás Combarro and Jose Dávila— were invited to work in situ with the intention of starting a dialogue between the exhibition space (the project room or Espazo Anexo) and its surroundings (the city of Vigo).
All of them sharing a common interest towards the social and architectural context, worked on the concept of the contemporary city as heterogeneous space, where intertwined relationships are established. All of them created site-specifics, hence converting the Anexo into a place of conclusion or formalization of the experiences, as opposed to the traditional consideration of the museum as a place to display objects. Most of the times, the result was archive material formalised in an exhibition format. On other occasions, it acquired a more sculptural dimension, as in Davila’s proposal, Espacio continuo [Continuous Space.]
Artists
Jose Dávila
Jose Dávila (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974)
Davila’s works show a strong relation with matter, structure, the architectural detail of a place and the space itself; aspects revealing his training as an architect. He creates photographs, sculptures, installations and interventions in which he interacts with the spaces we inhabit, always staging the architectural representation, creating unique spaces which make the constructions’ intrinsic qualities stand out. Thus, he creates works like the one made in Santiago de Chile in 2002, in which he formally camouflages one of the crossbeams supporting the exhibition space with a pile of used cardboard boxes, or the Container realised in Art Basel Miami Beach in 2008, where he cuts a container into pieces of the same size, to subsequently remove some of the pieces, therefore creating an installation that reminds us of the Donald Judd’s classics — the shipping container as an object that modifies and articulates space. In his proposals for Camden Arts Center (London, 2001) and Casa de América (Madrid, 2005) he duplicates the buildings’ façade by means of scaffolding structures and coloured coating plastic fabrics, through which he transforms the relationship between the passerby and the building, as he invites them to go out through the scaffolding stairs. It is about pieces which show that architecture and its representation constitute the centre of his work, his research and intervention fields.
Jose Dávila was born in Guadalajara (Mexico) in 1974. After his graduate in Architecture at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente TESO in Guadalajara, Mexico (1998), he completed his training with his residence Braziers Intl. Workshop in Oxford, UK (2000); residence in Camden Arts Centre (2001) as a result of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Award; residence in Kunswerke, Berlin, Germany (2003-2004); and the latest residence at MAM São Paulo, Brazil (2009). His career has been acknowledged with various schollarships and awards: the selection for the III Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura in Santiago de Chile (2002), Premio Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico (2001), selection for the Bienal de Monterrey, member of Ediciones el Chino (2001), or the scholarship to take part in the seminar ‘Estudios de Arte Contemporáneo’, FARCO A.C., Guadalajara, Mexico (1998). Watch your step was his first solo exhibition in Galería NAP, Guadalajara, Mexico (1998), and many others to follow: Temporality is a question of survival at Camden Arts Centre, London UK (2001), Erasing Memory, Galería Enrique Guerrero, Mexico (2002), Project room at ARCO 04, Madrid (2004), Nomadic Platform, Casa de América, Madrid (2005), The Illegal Architect, Studio d’Arte contemporanea D’abbeni, Lugano, Italy (2006), Hechiso, Valenzuela & Klenner, Bogotá, Colombia (2007), Studies for Future Buildings, Renwick Gallery, New York (2008), Container, Renwick Gallery Art Positions, Art Basel, Miami Beach, Florida (2008), Flying City, COMMA’03, Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK (2009), Dos más dos igual a cinco, Travesia Cuatro, Madrid (2009). Among his group shows: Selección Bancomer, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (2003), Light and atmosphere, Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA (2004), To build, to dwell, to think, IVAM, Valencia (2008), PRETHUNDERDOME curated by Matthew Strauss, White Flag Projects, St Louis, USA (2009), Colección Jumex, Bass Museum, Miami (2009), Hecho en Casa, curated by Osvaldo Sánchez, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (2009) or Panorama, Bienal de Arte Brasileira, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Museo de Arte Moderno São Paulo, Brazil (2009).
Curatorial text
“Within the cycle ‘PUNTOS DE ENCUENTRO/MEETING POINTS’, Davila’s project proposes new ideas about the relationship between the museum and its urban surroundings. It is a sculpture without a beginning nor an end characterised by its spatiality, or three-dimensionality, which invites the viewer to move inside the work itself so that it can be fully grasped. The generated space extends outside of the architectural boundaries, transforming the Espazo Anexo in an annexe of the street and vice versa, thus generating life instead of referring to it.
Davila’s intervention arises from a reflexion on the lack of continuity he observed in the urbanism of Vigo, after his stay in the city. He tackles the concept of site-specific, since he adds elements of the Espazo Anexo — columns, walls and ceiling — as part of the intervention itself, and refers to the idea of ruin by simulating the floor of an invisible building, inhabited by the passerby.
This work can be contextualised in the line of modular structures that Dávila makes from the Minimal assumptions by authors like Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd (Sin título, 2008, the cut container for Sculpture Project for Art Positions, Art Miami Basel 08; Sin título, 2007, cardboard boxes piled like shelves in a series referred to Judd’s metallic installations, etc.) but, above all, as an homage to the concept of fluid space popularised by Le Corbusier on the ground floor of his open, transparent buildings, in which inner and outer spaces converged.
The fluid space is one of the milestones in art and architecture of the 20th Century. Its origins can be established in Cubism, as a derivation of modern assumptions of Einstein’s physics in which space was conceived with relation to a subject in motion. Dávila is concerned about achievements in architecture, utopias and discoveries, perception and mental games. He acknowledges in the visionary Buckminster Fuller — one of those architects who build more with ideas than with materials — a constant inspiration, and he has even revised the so-known geodesic cupola that gave reputation to Fuller in various pieces with combinations of polyhedrons or Platonic solids.
The references to the ‘representation’ of the architectural thing, to the binomials construction/destruction and shape/content, always include the time factor, in the form of the visitor who completes the work. Dávila is continuously generating situation, but this urban intervention goes beyond cubes and Platonic forms in order to take into consideration the abstraction of a ruin, the abstraction of time and the reconstruction generated from the shadows and the impact of light.
The proposal is shown to us as a conclusion of some of the artist’s concerns present throughout all of his work: his relationship with place and space; the combination between movement and static shapes; the infinite reproduction of modular shapes; the functionality of built spaces. It corresponds to the studio-less practice, considered by the artist as a way of production that transforms the studio into an office — the work is created from the office but not in it —, moving away from the traditional consideration of atelier. The resulting work generates a new space in the surroundings, contagiously becoming urban furniture ready to be used by the citizen, an essential element in every city.
Agar Ledo Arias
Curator of the exhibition
Curator
Agar Ledo
Agar Ledo is Chief Curator of the MARCO Vigo, where she has directed and curated the museum exhibition program for the last decade. She has curated exhibitions by artists Ánxel Huete, Grace Schwindt, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Patricia Esquivias, Pedro Barateiro, Carlos Bunga and Diego Santomé, among other proposals focused on the analysis of the cultural production in Galicia and the social and political implications around artistic practices. Ledo has a Master’s Degree in Museology and training residencies at Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK), Le Consortium (Dijon), Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and ICI-Independent Curators International (New York). Her professional career has lead her to work at CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 1998-2004), Fundación Luis Seoane (A Coruña, 2005) and at the first edition of BIACS (Seville, 2004-2005), in which she worked as exhibitions coordinator under the guidance of one of the most far-sighted curators and art historians on the 20th Century: Harald Szeemann. She regularly writes texts for specialised publications and is member of the Grial magazine editorial board. She collaborates as a teacher in some of the post-graduate courses at the University of Vigo (MD in Contemporary Art, Creation and Research, 2016-2017) and at the University of Santiago de Compostela (University Expert in Cultural Management, 2015-2017; MD in Art, Museology and Contemporary Critic, 2008-2012).
