Painting

Jose Dávila’s wide variety of paintings on canvas share the same conceptual intention, the overlapping of already existing images coming from different sources. The canvas functions as a transformation ground: words can substitute an object, an image can replace a word, the name of an object can become an image. Dávila understands the pictorial field as a platform where the relations between images, objects and words get loosened up; the path from a word towards an image can be diverted or delayed, painting becomes a certain accumulation of detours.

These recent works by Dávila display new methods of association, replacement, juxtaposition and fusion. A series of geometric elements interrupt silkscreened descriptions coming from different sources: books about art history, the nature of human perception or anatomy. The graphics, on the other hand, come directly from some of Dávila’s artistic references: Ellsworth Kelly, geometric abstraction, the Brazilian neo-concrete movement, Russian constructivism, Hilma af Klint, among others. At the same time, it is an exploration on composition, one of the formal aspects of painting, where the artist takes conscious controlled aesthetic decisions of the distribution of shapes and color.