Known for his works that explore precarious balance, Jose Dávila materializes universal forces of nature and physical phenomena such as gravity and equilibrium. By creating unexpected encounters between materials—concrete, marble, wood, glass, stone—where human intervention appears through straps holding his installations together, the artist explores the dichotomies of nature and humanity, solidity and fragility, stability and uncertainty, reality and imagination, permanence and impermanence over time. The exhibition’s title, Stones Know How to Sleep thus resonates as a poetic metaphor for quiet resignation to the greater, universal forces of the natural world.

This exhibition at the MAZ in Guadalajara is not a retrospective but an introspective journey—a “re-vision” 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. Playing with the idea of the ‘unfinished,’ he challenges conventional notions of artistic completion and authorship while aligning with an appropriationist approach and referencing influential artists from art history.

With an academic background in architecture, the Mexican artist creates large-scale installations of glass and concrete blocks that seem on the brink of collapse, using risk and instability as catalysts for new narratives. His use of cut-outs also stands as a quintessential image of a dividing line. Born to a Texan mother, Dávila questions the concept of borders—arbitrary lines that dictate identity by redrawing maps, while communities, families, and cultures remain far more complex, fluid, and ‘borderline’ than a simple cut on a map.

Set in the artist’s hometown of Guadalajara, Stones Know How to Sleep is a deeply personal unveiling of Jose Davila, and invites the viewer to challenge today’s fixation with novelty, favoring instead the power of reinterpretation – a reactivation of the past to better look at the present, and onto the future.

Jérôme Sans

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