Jose Dávila’s Minimalist Gravity-Defying Sculptures.

Mexican artist Jose Dávila has become a sensation for his photographic cutouts of the world’s most architecturally significant buildings. In his latest sculptural exhibition, ‘State of Rest,’ exhibited at Mexico City’s Galería OMR earlier this year, Dávila pared down his focus to the fundamental building blocks of architecture. “State of rest is a physical term that describes an object when all forces applied to it neutralise each other,” explains Dávila, who installed five half-ton rectangular slabs of marble and granite throughout the gallery’s various rooms. The artist hung the rock formations using orange, red, and yellow commercial tie-down straps that suspend the stones at oblique angles, referencing Barnett Newman line paintings and Fred Sandback yarn sculptures. As if frozen in time, the sculptures display a fragile representation of conflicting forces as “all the elements in the sculptures are working against each other all the time, against gravity, against the weight of the stones.”

Although minimal at it’s core, Dávila’s approach to sculpture is highly engaging and captivating. His exploration of geometry, materiality and complete disregard for forces of gravity make us feel just a little bit excited. Simple as that.

[Images courtesy of Jose Dávila and Galería OMR.]