Museum Haus Konstruktiv is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to Mexican artist Jose Dávila (b. 1974 in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he lives and works). Alongside selected new paintings, a multitude of sculptural works are presented, which Dávila combines to produce surprising ensembles of works while conscientiously engaging with the museum’s architectural givens.

Trained as an architect, this artist is interested in space and mass, in mathematical laws and physical phenomena. Thus, his oeuvre characteristically plays with gravity and apparent weightlessness, with statics and dynamics, forces of tension and compression, and those precarious moments before something collapses. In addition, he incorporates found natural and industrially manufactured materials, from whose juxtaposition he creates works that are as sensorially poetic as they are formally stringent.

The exhibition begins on the first floor with the room-filling installation The Act of Being Together, conceived specially for Museum Haus Konstruktiv: Twenty-one prefabricated steel girders, up to four meters high, each stand opposite equally heavy boulders from the Zurich region. The opposing pairs are each connected by a steel cable, which is suspended by a hook hanging from the ceiling. If a steel girder tips over, the counterweight connected via the cable serves as a safeguard. The tense situations in these structurally remarkable constellations are further enhanced by the artist’s choice of materials. Here, Dávila combines natural stones with mechanically processed industrial products, thus thematizing the dichotomy between nature and culture, which is currently being renegotiated in the context of climate change. Moreover, the artist’s minimalist-looking construction in steel and stone also symbolizes a socially relevant value: that of togetherness. Dávila himself sees this piece as an allegory of the events of the last two years: “It thus becomes an allegory that summarizes the last two years in the world, the social fabric, the city as container, the metropolis skyline, it is also a work that can be related to monolithic objects or Neolithic ‘monuments’ that we can only interpret but we’ll never be sure exactly what they were made for, what their exact meaning or intention is, we just contemplate their presence, they usually transmit or portray a profound moment that becomes personal but untraceable to its original intention.”

On the second floor, two multi-part works from 2020 are brought together. First, visitors encounter an installation arranged on a pedestal: Will has moved mountains, whose title refers to a Bible verse that says faith can move mountains (New Testament 1 Cor. 13:2). A tilted concrete cube on a stone, two wooden beams stacked on top of each other and four large-format reflective panels leaning precariously, each supported by a metal pipe, a steel girder, a branch or a stone, are lashed together with tension belts to produce a spectacular spatial sculpture. The sculpture’s fragile stability is the result of a precisely balanced correspondence between all the objects’ forces, supports and tilt angles. Just a minimal displacement of individual parts would cause the glass panels to tip over and shatter on the floor. The suspenseful effect conveyed to the observer is appealing and threatening in equal measure.

The painting Memory of a Telluric Movement hangs on the wall behind the installation. Five portrait-format canvases in red can be seen, arranged alongside each other, whereby the fourth canvas, slightly shifted downward, breaks rank. This eccentricity is further emphasized by a differently colored square shape, the top-right corner of which extends into the fifth canvas. The slanted square has the same angle of inclination as the tilted concrete cube in the installation Will has moved mountains, causing the two works to enter into dialog; both vividly represent the phenomenon of gravity – one in a physically experienceable manner in the space, the other depicting it on a two-dimensional canvas.

Memory of a Telluric Movement is also the title of this exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv. Jose Dávila’s sensitive handling of mass and lightness, volume and transparency, geometric and organic forms, and natural and industrial materials characterizes his distinctive objects, installations and paintings. At the same time, the exhibits at Haus Konstruktiv constitute a reminder that any (telluric) movement, no matter how slight, can cause an intact balanced structure to collapse. In this sense, the solo show also refers to the global situation, which can quickly be thrown out of kilter by sociopolitical, ecological or economic developments.

In the columned hall, Dávila presents a wide range of objects. Many of these are positioned singly, such as Our similarities bring us to a common ground (2021), The exception that proves the rule (2021), The Act of Perseverance (2022), Collaborating together despite our differences (2022) and Fundamental Concern (2022) – whereas others are arranged to form the tension-filled group Singularity has something of the unreal (2022). They all create a sculptural landscape, a variety-rich route. The space as a whole is dynamized via fine-tuning of proportions, lines of sight, reflections, and possibilities regarding motion. The pieces shown here are the result of combinations or variations of previous works. For some of his works, the artist makes paper sketches – for others, he tries out various experimental compositions with his materials in the studio. Dávila himself speaks of an “ecosystem of objects”.

Dávila’s exhibits reveal manifold links to 20th-century art history, especially to constructivist-concrete art, minimal art, arte povera and conceptual art. With Objet du Voyageur (The traveler’s item), for example, a bicycle wheel on a stacked tower of metal, concrete, and brick, Dávila alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 ready-made Roue de Bicyclette. Echoes of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack resonate in Acapulco chair stack (2021), an artistically poetic interpretation of a classic design from Mexico. The large-format paintings presented in the columned hall also have a quotation-like nature. During the corona pandemic, Dávila intensively addressed the iconography of the circle in 20th-century art history. As a symbol, the circle represents, among other things, unity, the absolute, the complete, the divine, infinity or (in the form of the ouroboros snake biting its own tail) recurrence. Dávila’s new paintings are also about the recurring: In these, he has harked back to circle paintings by artists such as Hilma af Klint, Frank Stella and Willys de Castro, copying and reassembling parts of them. The title of these works, The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation, is borrowed from an entry in the Cambridge Dictionary on the term ‘circularity’. Dávila’s newly developed narratives, with which he stimulatingly recontextualizes historical positions, show that (art) history does not just go round in circles, but is always moving forward.