While in grad school, I visited the SCAD Art Museum and caught the exhibit by Jose Dávila entitled Practical Structures. Dávila is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and architecture. He is a conceptual post-minimalist who works with site-specific commissions. For this exhibit, Dávila appropriated large slabs of granite and marble from the Garpa Company in Savannah. He arranged them so they capture a Richard Serra feel, where the walls appear frozen right before the fall. Through his artwork, he presents Borges’s definition of an aesthetic act as anticipation before revelation that remains unrealized. He studies and presents with his artwork “the universal struggle of humanity against gravity. The audience’s relationship to the structures is serene, intimate, and profound with a sense of energy and dynamism. The sculptures act upon the surrounding architecture, transforming it into charged theater. With only three elements–the straps, the bolts, and the slabs of marble–gravity is defeated. If one part fails, they all fail.

Dávila reflects on the failures of utopia and modernist architectural principles in his various artworks. In The Fact of Constantly Returning to the Same Point or Situation we understand his statement, “There is something poetic in failure and in our limitation because we live with a modernism that is not preserved, where we see buildings that are not abandoned or demolished, and others have been badly remodeled.”

Studying Dávila’s oeuvre left me fascinated with this artist’s conceptual mind and his use of many disciplines. He has taken the idea of appropriation and re-contextualized it; his works are minimalist exercises in translation. He uses materials in unexpected combinations and possibilities like Los Limites de lo Posible. As Dávila describes art, “What makes an artwork is not the object or the material itself, but what you can extract from it.” By combining nature with industrial materials together, perhaps we can understand the current renegotiation in climate change.

For twenty years, Dávila made art relating to existing images and art history. While working on his first NFT appropriating the image of Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers called Untitled Femme D’alger, he explained. “I have the possibility to play with the moments of absence and presence digitally, this dynamic aspect for the image to be moving and be showing certain aspects that sometimes disappear. They can come back again and disappear again, is something I couldn’t have done, or I couldn’t do with the traditional paper cutout.”

By modifying and reinterpreting the historical works of Donald Judd in his piece called Giant Beetle, he verifies his relationship with space and architecture. The same occurs with conceptual artist Sol Le Witt with his works like Continuous Space. From Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstroke series, Dávila borrowed Untitled (Drowning Girl) and made prints. His works expand possibilities through translation, appropriation, and reinvention.

Check out Dávila’s first foray into film entitled The Stranger, The Stranger and The Stranger.

More of Dávila’s work can be seen at his galleries: Sean Kelly, Perrotin, Galeria OMR, and Konig Galerie.