Duel – Jose Dávila. Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

Where and when

From

3July 2018

11October 2018

Museo Novecento

Ground Floor

The Florence exhibition is a unique opportunity to get to know the work of Jose Dávila, one of the most active artists of his generation in creating unprecedented relationships between the sculptural gesture and the definition of architectural space, between the reactivation of collective memory and the contemplation of instant, of the kairos in the direct experience of reality and art.

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

9:00 pm

Thursday

The second appointment of the duel cycle conceived by the artistic director of the twentieth century museum, Sergio Risaliti. The star of the exhibition, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost (until 11 October), curated by Lorenzo Bruni, is the Mexican artist Jose Dávila, at his first solo show in an Italian institution. As in the previous edition – which had seen Ulla Von Brandenburg as the protagonist – the invited artist chose a work among those kept in the collections of the Florentine museum (Mario Radice, composition c.f. 124, 1939) and starting from this he developed a site specific project in dialectic both with the painting and with the spaces of the museum, in particular with the deconsecrated chapel on the ground floor of the building.

Through the installation of works belonging to different moments of his research, Dávila invites us to reflect on how the signs and traces that inhabit the current global world – in many cases belonging to the history of art – can be interpreted and on the need to give importance to the rediscovery or direct re-appropriation of them, with the aim of escaping the mere recognition of their constituent elements obtained by means of electronic devices that act as digital archives.

The artist thus explains the choice of the title Not all those who wander are lost which naturally evokes the search for a new collective identity: “I am one of the people lost in this wandering out of history. […] Art is a vast universe in which you can move without a final destination, and that is why you are not completely lost in it. In fact, the purpose is to ask oneself and to continue to question oneself about things and not just to find them. This second exhibition of the DUEL cycle confirms the will of the artists who established themselves since the early 2000s to reflect on the need for a new confrontation with the legacy of modernism and to reactivate the reservoir of collective memory to identify new perspectives of meaning and belonging“.

The works on display all act on the search for the balance between opposites such as modern and classic, warm and cold, soft and hard, material and immaterial, heavy and light. The coexistence of contrasts is conceived by Jose Dávila to give greater importance to the moment of fruition, to how the forms in this case of sculpture are observed and shared.

The two works Aporia I and Aporia II, both of 2017, consist of a particular type of assembly thanks to which a semi-transparent glass plate is placed vertically in the center of the space. The visitor is involved in an anodyne perception between concern and safety, because the glass is firmly held upright by an anchoring system that uses heavy marble elements or single boulders that offer resistance and prevent the slab from falling. It is a tension between materials different in origin and use that transforms sculpture into a filter tool of reality – through glass – but also into a device for perceptive amplification of the dialectic between ephemeral and permanent, between the instantaneity of the gesture and the eternity of the monument.

Dávila’s urgency to provoke reflections is also manifested in the choice of titles: for example Aporia – the opposite of the tautological practice proposed by the North American conceptual artists of the 1960s – and Daylight found me with no answer of 2013. A slight irony is at the base of this invention of five meters in length for an approximate diameter of three meters. Davila makes fun of the monumental tradition of the previous century by creating an assembly of various colored tubes to draw the sign of infinity in the air.

The Origins of Drawing VII of 2017 instead shifts the focus to the need to interpret the traces left by humanity, whether it is a modernist monochrome painting or a prehistoric drawing made on the rocks of a cave.
For the evocative space of the chapel, Dávila has imagined an installation that allows you to amplify the spiritual context of the place, identifying perspectives that go beyond the Christian rite, rethought at the time of post-ideologies.

The title Joint Effort – which could be translated as “joint effort” – highlights the tension between different elements such as stones, mechanical belts for anchoring and transporting goods, a sheet of glass. Sculpture becomes a means of connection between mental and physical space, between observing and experiencing. The dialectic and the balance reached between opposing elements and forces reminds us of the need to share values and experiences with each other, in order to make real a change and a transformation of reality itself.

The exhibition Not all those who wander are lost is conceived by the artist not as an exhibition of single works, but as a unique and organic narrative, as Dávila explains to the curator Lorenzo Bruni: “In this exhibition in Florence, all the works revolve around the new awareness that my generation must take into consideration when confronted with knowledge. I dealt with all this starting from a dialogue with Mario Radice’s 1939 work, chosen from among those in the museum’s collection. There are two reasons why this work struck me. The first is connected to the historical period in which Radice was active and which was the Fascist period. It is a period that I studied a lot especially for the contribution of rationalist architects like Terragni to whom the painter from Como was very attached. Starting from this dialogue, I tried to create a different opening, a window with which to observe the present time, crossed by various forms of populism and extreme conservatism. The other reason is related to the reflection on the abstract codes of my entire practice. I wanted to observe it starting from a new and completely unusual point of view by means of the presence of the historicized, but also a-historical gesture of Mario Radice. For me, however, it is not just a conceptual process, but a reactivation of the senses. This is why it has always been important in my practice to work on how to perceive abstract forms and not just to create them. I always aim to make their weight and gravity evident and consequently to transform dialogue with space into an active experience“.

Jose Dávila

(Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974; lives and works in Guadalajara) creates works that are always the result of an intimate and structural dialogue between different materials assembled in a new temporary as well as perennial condition. They are sculptures, paintings, installations or environmental interventions that highlight the human intervention that transforms the space and re-signifies the objects of everyday life. This action arises from the desire to create a balance between the way in which objects are conceived and interpreted on a conceptual level and the way in which they appear in their immanence of form and matter. This practice led him to confront himself with the collective memory reservoir of conceptual art and poor art, but also with the modernist architecture of the past century and to create works that are “activators” of meaning.Dávila’s multidisciplinary work starts from the creation of a visual vocabulary that is aimed at reflecting on the theme of trace and repetition. All the variations of a form, in his work, arise from the conditions and characteristics of the materials and means used. His work is a material and visual aporia, an indissoluble logical paradox in which fragility and resistance, calm and tension, geometry and chaos, balance and instability coexist. Jose Dávila studied architecture at the Institute of Technology and Higher Studies of the West from 1993 to 1998, however he considers himself a creative self-taught. His works have been exhibited at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE; Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, USA; Savannah College of Art and Design, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; Museum Voorlinden, AG Wassenaar, Holland, University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC Mexico City; Forum Caixa, Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; Kunstwerke Berlin; San Diego Museum of Art; Reina Sofía Art Museum, Madrid; MAK Vienna, Austria; Jumex Foundation / Collection, Mexico City; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Museu do Arte Moderna, San Paolo; The Moore Space, Miami; NICC Antwerp, Belgium. Among the many international publications in which his work is mentioned are to be mentioned: Cream 3, ed. Phaidon; 100 Latin American artists, ed. Exit and The Feather and The Elephant, ed. Hatje Cantz. Dávila received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a residence of the Berlin Kunstwerke and the National System of Creators of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts, in Mexico. Jose Dávila is one of the founding members of the Office for Art Projects (OPA), in Guadalajara, Mexico and was awarded the 2017 Baltic Artists’ Award alongside artists Eric N. Mack, Toni Schmale and Shen Xin; in addition to preparing a project for the public space in Los Angeles as part of the PST.