AGUA-CIELO 

Paola Dávila 

Curated by Laura González Flores 

Apr 20 - Jun 1, 2024

Opening on Saturday, April 20th, 2024 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM

It seems incredible that “blue,” the color that distinguishes the recent work of Paola Dávila, is not mentioned even once in The Odyssey. When Homer describes the sea, the primary setting of his story, he simply talks about the “dark and deep.” It was later that the Greeks began to use kyanos for dark blue and glaukos for light and greenish blue.

Made on the beaches of the Sea of Cortez, Dávila's works emerge from that sea, so blue. The artist renounces her ability to represent to, instead cause her papers and silks prepared with the cyanotype solution to encounter natural elements. With the water, salt, and algae that come off their natural environment to die on the beach. The algae leave their trail on the humid sand of that laboratory-landscape. And they write, thanks to the luminous energy of the sun, the chemistry of salts, and the physics of tides, authentic photographs, writings of light—or water-sky images.

Can we face the sea, so blue? Or the sky? In their infinite shades of blue, in their random shapes, Paola Dávila's works invite us to immerse ourselves in the darkness and depth of our time: a time in which the human species has preyed on and contaminated its habitat to the point of almost exhausting it. Her way of working also points towards new conceptions of contemporary art, in her case, that of biological art. An art that results from the collaborative agency of human and non-human entities and that, like the sea and the sky—water-sky—can be seen either together or separately.

Today, blue calls you. It invites you to immerse yourself in the depths of the images and find, perhaps, a different feeling from your time on earth.

Laura González Flores

Paola Dávila, Saloma XXV, 2023, Cyanotype on silk, 75 x 75 cm, Ed. 1/1.