Jose Dávila The Stones Know How to Sleep

After more than a decade of exhibiting in national and international museums, Jalisco-born artist Jose Dávila returns to his hometown with 'Stones Know How to Sleep'. This solo exhibition presents a meditation on the silent endurance of the natural world’s universal forces. Immobile and timeless, stones embody a contemplative attitude towards existence—a reminder, as the artist expresses, that change can be embraced without losing one’s essential core.

Conceived in collaboration with curator Jérôme Sans, the exhibition at EstaciónMAZ revisits 25 years of practice, not as a retrospective, but as an introspective process: a revision of Dávila’s vocabulary through a selection of key works. It is an invitation to engage with a practice that continues to evolve while maintaining a coherent language of balance, tension, and resistance.

His work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, and is characterized by the introduction of instability, layered references, lines, and cut-outs. Dávila frequently draws on art history—referencing Orphism in his circle paintings, the Pictures Generation through Richard Prince’s iconic cowboy image, and Minimalism in his Luminous Whispers series, where concrete blocks are balanced, or in his reinterpretation of Donald Judd’s Stack, made of cardboard. Circularity is a recurring obsession in Dávila's practice, yet he subverts historical forms by introducing fragmentation and voids, questioning the boundaries that frame artworks, challenging traditional notions of authorship, and exploring ideas of permanence and transformation.

Rather than presenting a linear history, the exhibition reflects Dávila’s approach to sculpture as an open, ever-shifting field, where past and present coexist dynamically. His work challenges hierarchies of materials and forms, allowing disparate elements—such as cardboard, river stones, or bicycles—to find an integrated place within a constructive order governed by forces rather than by imposed narratives.

In 'Stones Know How to Sleep', the works appear as silent witnesses to the larger, often invisible structures that shape our environment. Like stones that endure through time, the sculptures propose a reflection on persistence, equilibrium, and the potential for transformation within the structures we inhabit.