JUAN DÁVILA Born in Santiago de Chile in 1946 and immigrated to Australia in 1974 immediately after Pinochet’s coup d’état, Dávila has developed a long artistic career that led him to participate in the famous Kassel’s Documenta 12 in 2007. Curated by Paco Barragán, Juan Dávila: Painting and Ambiguity gathers a wide and varied selection of Dávila’s artistic production over the last five years, including large-format paintings, watercolours, intervened posters, as well as several installations and pieces produced on-site for the MUSAC. Dividing his time between Australia and Chile, Dávila was part of the so-called Escena de Avanzada (the Chilean avant-garde of the 1970s), although his integration into this movement was never easy due both to the themes he tackled and to his preference for painting. From his beginning as a painter, Dávila has always questioned discourses related to sexuality, gender, immigration, colonialism, multiculturalism, postmodernity and otherness in a critical and forceful way. As the title itself suggests, the show not only confronts the viewer with the contradiction and complexity of Dávila’s painting, but also with the violence emanating from a contemporary global society that eschews the other; in short: the different. South American Indian, colonial, modern and postmodern influences give rise to a hybrid and socially committed painting that addresses the above-mentioned issues from a novel perspective and palette that subversively question official history through the use of humour, irony and parody. Dávila offers, to paraphrase Foucault, a “counter-history”, inasmuch as the artist appropriates the right to create a counter-discourse that contests the truth and legitimacy of the official discourse and takes the side of the underdogs: the transsexual, the “sudaca” (racist slur used in Spain for a South American person), the mestizo, the woman, the immigrant, the refugee or the Mapuche Indian. Thus, the viewer is presented with a new version of his now iconic and controversial Libertador Simón Bolívar — let us remember that the exhibition of this work in 1994 at the Hayward Gallery in London caused a diplomatic conflict between Chile and Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. Sitting in a pose that resembles a classic female portrait rather than the mythical manly Libertador, we find an anti-heroic, effeminate, transvestite and impure historical character who rides on the injustices and contradictions of race, social class, gender and colonialism.
PAINTING AND AMBIGUITY
Also astounding and certainly enigmatic pieces such as Sudaca (2017) and Tratado de Tordesillas (2018), of audacious and vivid palette, deal with the yet unreconciled history, both past and present, that Spain has with Latin America, and that, perhaps, the term “sudaca” exemplifies better than any other. A problematic love-hate relationship that speaks of injustice and massacres, submission and plunder and, above all, of a guilt for which “Spain as a colonising power — according to Dávila — has not yet asked for forgiveness”.
Ambiguity and bodies in flux Throughout his oeuvre, from some of his first pieces such as Nemesis (1976) or Wurlitzer (1978) to more recent works included in the exhibition such as Eleleleu! (2014), Yes (2014), Ralco (2016) or Figure 203 (2018), we find certain enigmatic characters conceived by the artist who are neither women, nor men, nor transsexuals, but represent all of them at the same time. “They just came out like this, unbidden” says Dávila. “They are images that do not belong to the logic of modernity nor to the rigid digital era where there is nothing between 0 and 1”. Undoubtedly, his characters refer to a polymorphous sexuality that represents the masculine-feminine subject as an entity eternally in flux and with a potential for change and for establishing a new, flexible and more democratic configuration of gender relations. And this is seemingly the message conveyed by these fascinating characters in hermaphroditic bodies, which according to curator Paco Barragán, “could very well be examples of alternative bodies and alternative memories as opposed to hetero-normative bodies and official histories”. Dávila manages to transfer this quality of “ambiguity” to his painting not only through the social engagement revealed by his choice of figures and backgrounds, but also through his use of surprising and contrasting colour, his subtle yet vigorous brushstrokes and the sense of mystery that always permeates his works. “When one looks back on almost fifty years of Dávila’s work,” Barragán says, “one is perfectly aware not only of the complexity and contemporary relevance of the subject matters he deals with, but also of how, from a formal point of view, he has never stopped moving forward and experimenting, renewing his own pictorial language and creating works that never cease to amaze”.
09.06.18 - 18.11.18
JUAN DÁVILA PINTURA Y AMBIGÜEDAD
PAINTING AND AMBIGUITY
SALA 2