PABLO DÁVILA: WHY DID YOU TAKE MY WATCH?
Kasmin presents “Pablo Dávila: Why Did You Take My Watch?”, the first New York solo exhibition of Mexico City-based artist Pablo Dávila (b. 1983).
February 27 – March 29, 2025
“Pablo Dávila: Why Did You Take My Watch?” features new works that iterate Dávila’s research-based process in various media. Employing a visual language to encapsulate complex systems, theories and ideas, Dávila’s works offer poetic reflections on the perception of time and space.
Pulling from the first line of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” (1979) for the exhibition title, “Pablo Dávila: Why Did You Take My Watch?” reflects Dávila’s interest in the construction of time and space through art. The film, recognized for its otherworldly setting, analogues Dávila’s capacity to collate distinct moments in the works on view. Inspired by the words of American Science fiction writer William Gibson, “Time moves in one direction, memory in another,” Dávila’s works consider the natural force of memory as a guide to explore the progression of time.
Included in the exhibition are several new “Phase paintings” series (2019–ongoing), Dávila’s celebrated series of meticulously perforated canvases that translate weather data into striking patterns and abstract compositions. Culled from different geographic locations at various points in time, Dávila’s works document the unrepeatable, spontaneous conditions of wind activity in the earth’s atmosphere. Nearby, a ten-foot-tall site-specific mural, composed of thousands of iron studs hammered directly in the gallery wall, emerges from a similar conceptual approach to the “Phase paintings”.
The audio installation “A friendly reminder” (2025) revisits themes of the loop and cultural memory, which Dávila explored in a related installation at the Aichi Triennale 2022 in Japan. Played across multiple analog speakers, Dávila stitches together 2-second segments of the popular Mexican bolero song “El Reloj”, covered countless times since its first release in 1957. Overlaying recordings by different artists, each segment plays the phrase “Reloj, no marques las horas” (Clock, don’t mark the time) at slightly varying intervals.