Juan Davila y la Documenta12

Juan Davila

1946 in Santiago (CL), lives in Melbourne (AU)

Exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006 (AU); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006 (AU); Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra 2002 (AU)

General Introduction

Since the early 1970s, Juan Davila has consistently interrogated cultural, sexual and political identities in his art and writing, drawing on lineages of art and representation in Latin America, Australia, Europe and North America. Central to his work is the revision of dominant histories through the language of painting. Davila had to leave Chile in 1974 and has lived in Australia since that time. He is committed to an active involvement of artists in public discourse in both Chile and

Australia, and he has a great political awareness. Davila is interested in immigration policy and in the myths of national identity. At the same time, he has transferred many elements of colonial painting to Australia.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Davila’s paintings utilised strategies of quotation and fragmentation, combining elements from British and American Pop art with images drawn from everyday life – folk art, pornography and political images – to destabilise the authority of received art-historical narratives.

From the late 1980s his works began to incorporate more Latin American references and motifs, as they investigated the legacies of colonialism and the development of local modernity and its relationship to Indigenous culture.

More recently, Davila’s painting has operated in the stylistic mode of French salon painting, exploring a moment when academic painting fractured into modernity. Translating this to the contexts of Australia and Chile, Davila locates modernity beyond the European centres, arguing that this fragmentation occurred not only in Paris but also in Chile, influenced by the country’s Indigenous culture. At the same time, Davila re-establishes realism and figuration as means with which to convey political ideas and emotional impact.

Documenta12 Works

A selection of Juan Davila’s paintings from 1979 to 2003 is presented at documenta 12, displayed in each of the exhibition’s four central venues.

In the Aue-Pavilion, Hysterical Tears (1979) is a key work featuring Davila’s quotation method, presenting fragments of British and American Pop in a form of comic strip, indexed with a list that suggests a work with multiple authors. As a painter from Chile working in Australia, the problem of producing meaning was tackled directly through a dismantling of unity and a refusal of originality. Untitled (1986) continues this mode by locating a pornographic nude on an Allan D’Arcangelo highway painted in the manner of American Pop artist, balancing a Pop still life on his back.

In the documenta-Halle, The Lamentation: A Votive Painting (1991) references ex-voto painting, a form of painterly religious offering translated from Europe to the New World and widespread throughout Latin America. The paintings often incorporated mixed media and different scenes within the work, locating Davila’s use of fragmentation and collage within a Latin American modern history. With its references to torture and poverty, Davila delivers a scathing critique of politics and class in Latin America (and elsewhere, as the Australian references attest!)

In the Fridericianum are featured two paintings that draw on the scale and form of history painting: Schreber’s Semblance (1993), and The Arse End of the World (1994). Both works present a psychoanalytic reading of national identity and affiliations. The former relates the case of Dr Schreber, an important reference case of paranoid schizophrenia for Freud, to that of militarism and nationalism; the symbols of fascist and nationalist ideology appear in different forms around

Schreber like phantasms. The latter painting links the Australian mythic tale of the 19th century explorers Burke and Wills, who died while trying to cross the desert, with a 1990s political wrangle between the then-prime minister and his predecessor. In both cases a perverse relationship to the land is expressed; displaced and ambivalent. Also in the Fridericianum is a small work on paper, The Refugee Camp Condom Vending Machine (2002), with its use of a modernist grid lined with barbed wire suggesting the barbarism that underlies modernity and its desire for order.

A group of works in the Neue Galerie go deeper into Davila’s investigation of modernity; The Liberator Simón Bolívar (1994) presents the Latin American founding father as a working class prostitute of ambiguous gender and race, going to the heart of colonial anxiety around racial mixing and social hierarchies and tapping into the fragility of nationalist mythologies. The two recent paintings, On the Fringes of Melbourne (2003), produced in Davila’s realist salon mode, depict the intervention of modernist architecture into the Australian landscape, its blankness and phallic heroism erasing any sense of history or local knowledge in pursuit of a generic ‘international style’.

With the support of The Australian Government through the Australian Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

*

Fuente: Documenta12