Kaleidoscope
After decades of intense debate surrounding post-colonialism, artists from the so-called peripheries often still find themselves having to live up to certain expectations about where their art is produced, what kind of socio-political circumstances it responds to, or what local audiences it is aimed at. Jose Dávila is an artist born and living in Guadalajara, Mexico; a nation gifted with striking landscapes, abundant natural resources, and one of the most complex, distinctive and rich folkloric traditions in the world, it is also a country deeply affected by extreme inequity, poverty, illiteracy, violence, corruption and impunity.
Trained originally as an architect, and having been touched during his professional life by all the contradictions, fractures and tensions inherent to an underdeveloped society, Jose Dávila has managed however to cultivate an artistic language that subtly responds to the troubled aforementioned circumstances from a tangentially poetic perspective.
Acting like a visionary magpie that dives into a toxic dump looking for precious morsels, his loot includes devices from the Neo-Concretes, the Situationists and Oulipo amongst others. This convulsed context is then filtered, translated and assembled into a system of visual operations that include geometry, colour, chance and calculation as its main driving forces. Instead of emphasising - and in turn, deriving profit from - misery (as seen in much recent Latin American art), Dávila's perspective tackles and nurtures specific intrinsic concerns, generally centered around historic development of the visual arts.
Recently, one of the unspoken quid pro quo in the art world has been that a Mexican contemporary artist will dutifully generate references to abandonment, anguish, desolation, distress or pain in his work. But Jose Dávila - along with kindred artists Iñaki Bonillas, Stefan Brüggemann, Tercerunquinto or Francisco Ugarte, amongst others - has overturned this approach with a natural psychologically inverse reaction. He has explored imagination, knowledge and skill in an attempt to replace ugliness with beauty, chaos with equilibrium, excess with measure - a contemporary take on the Prayer to St Francis: "where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy".
It is well-known that Mexico's current administration champions art that fosters a safe, clean and attractive image of Mexico. It is also evident to most that all this sharply contrasts with the ubiquitous social crisis; crime and drug dealing being the most prominent of innumerable issues. Dávila's devotion to aesthetic refinement should definitely not be confused with this propaganda-driven centralised master plan (nor with the ornamental, market-oriented, opportunistic proposals and discourses of some other Latin American artists navigating the global art scene).
Dávila does not subscribe to illustrative nor didactic procedures. Instead, he drills down into how everyday materials can act as media for translating emotions or ideas. This may relate to the power dynamics in the ever-dwindling scheme of the centre and periphery, but has aspirations beyond this, in the terrain of the sentimental and the intimate.
The Sierpinski Variable (2009), Jose Dávila's recent commission for Bloomberg SPACE in London, presents an eloquent large-scale constellation of suspended geometrical shapes. Conceived as the evolution of two of the artist's previous projects (Space after Space, 2007, and Flying City, 2008), this new site-specific installation continues to explore Dávila's recurring fascination with levitating and disintegrating structures.
The basic units of the composition are hexagonal MDF frames. The inside of these frames are illuminated with fluorescent tubes, somehow reminiscent of corporate office light fixtures. Each one of the hexagons is missing at least one of its sides, giving way to the visual permeability of the group. Partly because of this, light becomes the inter-connective tissue between the fragments, time becomes part of the structure and formal dynamics between the units start to unfold as we
physically travel through the piece. Through a severe yet flexible game of adding and subtracting, Dávila has carefully arranged these elements in a fashion that can be considered stochastic: simultaneously premeditated and random.
On each outside face of the panels, it is possible to see a white chalk-like line drawn diagonally from corner to corner, evoking the instructive marks workers make on buildings under construction. These simple marks not only suggest its "work-in-progress quality", they also trigger some sort of fractalisation of its geometric principles: the title of this piece comes precisely from the way this visual sequence/pattern is unchained and derives from such single gesture.
There are some immediate impressions the viewer may be left with: a broken-up suspended labyrinth, a floating scaffolding device, a three-dimensional archipelago, an abandoned amusement park carousel, a kaleidoscope, a school of still, sub-aquatic creatures. The feeling of a science-fiction environment is also rather palpable, yet there is something warm and familiar about this piece that probably has to do with the gentle orchestration of proportions, shapes and materials.
Many references come to mind as to where this piece's inspiration may come from. Besides Dávila's natural inclination for Western architectural history, there might also be unconscious links to Native American imagery. Particularly resonant are the Huichol fractal patterns, rooted in native spirituality and often reflected in their colourful dress and other art forms, ancient shamanic practices, and mythical ceremonial traditions. In the light of the fact that the artist is himself a descendant of the Kickapoo people of Northern Mexico, this relationship is perfectly plausible.
In his 1970 film A Man Called Horse (coincidentally shot in Durango, Mexico), Elliot Silverstein provides an image that has become indelible to most of Jose Dávila's generation: inside a dimly lit cavernous tipi, a white man hangs dramatically from bone daggers pierced through the skin of his chest. This ritual, apparently a Sioux rite of passage referred to in this film as "Vow to the Sun", might perhaps be considered another reference to The Sierpinski Variable, in all of its magical and hallucinatory representation of transcendence through sacrifice.
A less solemn precedent to this piece can be found in a Mexican TV musical variety show called Siempre en Domingo; immensely popular for over three decades among worldwide Spanish-speaking audiences, the lively yet garish sets and stage designs of this show have been occasionally mentioned by Jose Dávila as a peculiar childhood memory, in some ways influential in the making of this recent work.
Ancestral, historical, mediatic, urbanistic and also artistic references converge in this project. Among the latter, Helio Oiticica's Nucleus and Grand Nucleus series provide a manifest precedent, in its interactive exploration of geometry and color in three dimensions. Also, although less symmetrical, there is a combination of a tranquil, soothing and charming presence in Dávila's The Sierpinski Variable that we usually find in many pieces by Félix González-Torres. On the other hand, specific cultural and political junctures related to Latin American recent history, find an eloquent voice through Bruce Nauman's South American Triangle, the renowned welded steel piece from the 1981 series of the artist's comments on the southern hemisphere's torture and oppression. It can be said that Dávila's current piece on view at Bloomberg SPACE channels an energy that can operate as a dynamic bridge between these last two references.
The Sierpinski Variable, one of Jose Dávila's most sophisticated projects to date, will hopefully be read as a rational and formal exercise that takes abstraction to another level, one of affection, as well as humanistic and social concern; a public piece that will hopefully incite contemplation and interaction, spirituality and physical dynamism.
Cristián Silva
Cristián Silva is a visual artist born in Chile.