Known for his works exploring a fragile balance, Jose Dávila materializes the universal forces of nature and physical phenomena such as gravity and equilibrium. By provoking unexpected encounters between materials—concrete, marble, wood, glass, stone—where human intervention appears through strips that hold the installation in place, the artist explores the dichotomies between nature and humanity, solidity and fragility, stability and uncertainty, reality and imagination, permanence and impermanence across time. The exhibition title, Las piedras sabes dormir (The Stones Know How to Sleep), resonates as a poetic metaphor for silent resignation in the face of the higher universal forces of the natural world.
The current exhibition at the MAZ in Guadalajara is not a retrospective but rather an introspective journey, a review of the artist's evolving vocabulary. Through architectural interventions, cut-outs, and sculptural assemblages, Dávila navigates themes of memory, identity, and historical reinterpretation, questioning notions of permanence and change. By playing with the idea of the unfinished, he challenges the principles of artistic completion and authorship while aligning himself with an appropriationist approach and referencing influential artists in art history.
With an academic background in architecture, the Mexican artist creates large-scale installations of glass and concrete blocks that always seem on the verge of collapse, using risk and instability as catalysts for new narratives. His use of cut-outs also stands out as the quintessential image of a dividing line. Born to a Texan mother, Dávila questions the concept of the border: those arbitrary lines that dictate identities by redrawing maps, whereas communities, families, and cultures are far more complex, fluid, and borderline than a simple cut on a map.
Set in the artist's hometown, Las piedras sabes dormir is a deeply personal unveiling by Jose Dávila, and invites viewers to challenge the contemporary fixation on novelty, in favor instead of the power of reinterpretation, a reactivation of the past to better look at the present, and toward the future.