“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
